Gob's Grief - Hardcover

Years after his young brother, Tomo, is killed during the Civil War, a grieving Gob Woodhull, the son of nineteenth-century feminist Victoria Woodhull, now studying to become a doctor, concocts a scheme to build a machine that can restore all the war dead to life. A first novel.

debut of an electrifying talent that gives the historical novel an exhilarating dose of originality, style, and visionary energy.

Gob's Grief recounts the lives of Gob and Tomo Woodhull, fictional twin sons of the real Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century proto-feminist. In August of 1863, Tomo, who is eleven years old, runs off to the Civil War and dies in his first battle. Gob grows up in a profound state of grief, and by the time that he's an adult studying to be a doctor in New York City, he has begun to make real a dream to build a machine that might bring Tomo—indeed, all the war dead—back to life.

As Gob's obsessions deepen, we are taken from the battlefields at Chickamauga Creek to the society balls of New York, from innocent childhoods in Homer, Ohio, to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge; and as the machine grows, so does the amazing cast of real and imagined characters: Walt Whitman, ministering lovingly to the Civil War wounded;