Historical Novel - Secrets in a House Divided
Set in Richmond in 1864-65, "Secrets in a House Divided" explores the complicated bonds between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, parents and children, as the Civil War drives them to a flash point. Shifts between those who have power and those who do not offer stunning insight into a time of national upheaval whose echoes continue today.
Advance praise for "Secrets in a House Divided"
“Rich in period detail and wise in matters of the heart, this compelling tale captivates a reader with the immediacy of history and the high drama of the home front, while providing emotional uplift, too.”
- Roy Hoffman, author of "Chicken Dreaming Corn" and "Come Landfall"
"Part love story, part tragedy, part war story, "Secrets in a House Divided" is everything we want in a novel.”
- Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina Poet Laureate
"Clara Silverstein, in this historical (and yet entirely contemporary and all-too-relevant) novel, brings a world, a place, a human experience to full life with her wild insight, her hot-wired imagination, and her boundless empathy—tempered with realism, infused with clarity. Her prose is poetry, but this lyricism never hides its truths. In this work we find the real to be as terrifying as we suspected it would be, and the spiritual to be as sublime as we never dared to hope it would be. This is the book we need right now, and the writer whose vision for whom we’ve been waiting. You will read Secrets in a House Divided without wanting to put it down, but you will return to it over and over again—looking for the beautiful sentences you highlighted, reliving the scenes that felt, as you read them, both feverish and hallucinatory, so visceral they might have been moments experienced in your own life. Nothing more can be asked from a writer, or from a reading experience.
- Laura Kasischke, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner and author of nine novels, including "The Life Before Her Eyes"