The political, social, technological and environmental repercussions of the American Civil War are still felt today. Two excellent new novels join the canon of Civil War fiction, highlighting this crucial period from different perspectives: one from a community of emancipated slaves, the other from a former Confederate soldier roaming the Texas landscape.

★ Conjure Women

In her stunning debut novel, Conjure Women, Afia Atakora explores life during the Reconstruction era for a community of formerly enslaved people living amid the ruins of their old plantation. Rue, a young woman versed in healing, midwifery and crafting curses—skills learned from her hoodoo-practicing mother, Miss May Belle—assists at the birth of a strange, pale baby born in a black caul and with black eyes. When a devastating illness begins rapidly killing the community's children while the pale child remains seemingly unaffected, the superstitious community, recently "saved" by a charismatic traveling preacher, begins to turn against Rue and the child. 

As chapters toggle between life on the plantation before and after the war, Atakora slowly reveals the complex web of stories tying Rue, May Belle and the plantation owner's strong-willed daughter, Varina, together. Atakora, a Pushcart Prize nominee who earned her MFA from Columbia University, relies on first-person accounts, diaries and autobiographies from the period to inform her writing, to great effect. The community's characters and the harsh realities of the black experience before and during Reconstruction come vividly to life. At the same time, Atakora paces her novel beautifully, slowly unwinding the plot in unexpected ways as she examines a relatively unexplored aspect of American history.

Simon the Fiddler

In Simon the Fiddler, bestselling author Paulette Jiles, whose novel News of the World was a National Book Award finalist, begins with a premise that seems impossibly far-fetched: A penniless young man finds love at first sight with a woman who is essentially a prisoner of her employer, just as she is about to leave for a distant town in a wild landscape. But Jiles makes the impossible plausible. 

Twenty-three-year-old fiddler Simon Boudlin avoids conscription into the Confederate Army until the last days of the war. After one of the war's final battles, Simon becomes part of a group of Union and Confederate musicians brought in to provide music for an event to celebrate the Confederacy's impending surrender. While playing, Simon sees the beautiful Doris Dillon, an indentured Irish governess to the daughter of a dangerous Union colonel. After speaking only a few words to her, Simon is completely smitten, but he and Doris must unfortunately go their separate ways. 

Despite owning nothing but his talent and a Markneukirchen violin, Simon decides he will marry Doris and purchase land for them to settle. Without a plan but with his goal firmly in mind, Simon sets forth with a ragtag band of musicians through Texas, which is still transitioning from the war. Simon overcomes hardships and danger to make steady progress toward his dream, but when he reaches San Antonio, where Doris lives with the colonel and his family, he faces his most difficult trial: rescuing Doris from the menacing colonel in a state still under military law. 

In this enthralling novel, Jiles pairs the hard-luck terrain of her Texas setting with a succinct, unadorned writing style. Simon the Fiddler not only entertains but also brings a fascinating period in Texas history to life.

Throughout the Civil War, wispy, unpunctilious Simon Boudlin has avoided conscription, but a barroom brawl in Texas lands him in the Confederate Army just as the fighting wanes. An expert fiddler, he's assigned to the regimental band and ends up playing for officers from both sides on the eve of Confederate surrender. There he spots Doris Mary Aherne, an indentured Irish girl who serves as governess to a Union colonel's daughter, and he swears he will do whatever he must to find her after the war. Following News of the World, a National Book Award finalist slated for the silver screen; with a 250,000-copy first printing.

Jiles's gritty and richly atmospheric seventh novel returns to the post–Civil War Texas she explored in News of the World. In the last year of the war, 23-year-old Simon Boudlin, an orphan musician from Kentucky who has avoided a stint in the Confederate Army, is rounded up by a couple of conscription men. After the war concludes, his body and fiddle still relatively intact, Simon and some friends are commissioned to play for a formal dinner for Confederate and Union officers at Fort Brown, Tex. There he is dazzled by Doris Dillon, the Irish governess for Colonel Webb of the Union Army, and determines that he will somehow buy some land and make her his bride. Simon and Doris trade letters over the next couple of years as he and his friends become "creatures of gaslight and shadows," traveling around coastal Texas for stray saloon gigs, and Doris works off her indentured servitude for the Webbs in San Antonio and fends off unwelcome advances from the colonel. When Simon finally makes his way to Doris, trouble ensues. Jiles immerses the reader in the sensory details of the era, with special emphasis on the demands and rewards of a ragtag Texas fiddle band. Jiles's limber tale satisfies with welcome splashes of comedy and romance. (Apr.)