Elm Creek #17
March 2011
On Sale: February 22, 2011
Featuring: Anneke Bergstrom; Constance Wright; Dorothea Granger
352 pages
ISBN: 0525952039
EAN: 9780525952039
Hardcover
$24.95
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Looking at the women in the War Between The States
The Union Quilters
by Jennifer Chiaverini
The New York Times bestselling author of the Elm Creek Quilts series joins the Dutton list with a Civil War-era tale of love and sacrifice behind Union lines.
With The Union Quilters, Chiaverini delivers a powerful story of a remarkable group of women coping with changing roles and the extraordinary experiences of the Civil War.
In 1862 Water’s Ford, Pennsylvania, abolitionism is prevalent, even passionate, so the local men rally to answer Mr. Lincoln’s call to arms. Thus the women of Elm Creek Valley’s quilting bee are propelled into the unknown.
Constance Wright, married to Abel, a skilled sharpshooter courageous enough to have ventured south to buy his wife’s freedom from a Virginia plantation, knows well her husband’s certainty that all people, enslaved and free, North and South, need colored men like him to fight for a greater purpose. Sisters-in-law Dorothea Nelson and Charlotte Granger wish safe passage for their learned husbands. Schoolmaster turned farmer Thomas carries Dorothea’s Dove in the Window quilt with him. Charlotte’s husband, Dr. Jonathan Granger, takes more than a doctor’s bag to his post at a field hospital. Alongside the devotion of his wife, pregnant with their second child, Jonathan brings the promise he made to his unrequited love, Gerda Bergstrom: “My first letter will be to you.”
Together with the other members of the circle, the women support one another through loneliness and fear, and devise an ingenious business plan to keep Water’s Ford functioning. That plan may forever alter the patchwork of town life in ways that transcend even the ultimate sacrifices of war.
The Civil War finds quilters a strong group of women to contend with
Excerpt
Chapter One
1861
Dorothea tied up the sack of salt pork and hard bread–enough for a week if Thomas didn’t find some poor soul in greater need to share with–and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, taking a deep breath, fighting to still the whirl of thoughts. She knew she had forgotten something, something essential, something her husband would suffer without on the long marches through hostile lands, on the cold, lonely nights away from home. If she remembered what it was after he left the Elm Creek Valley, after he crossed the pass through Dutch Mountain with the other brave and patriotic men who had decided to answer Mr. Lincoln’s call to arms, it would do him no good whatsoever. Though he was the love of her life and her most cherished friend, she could not follow Read More…
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