About this item

Readers of The Kitchen House and A Reliable Wife will love this page-turning southern gothic novel set in Reconstruction Alabama, about a young widow whose quest for truth turns into a race for her life. Augusta Branson, born of a prominent Southern family made destitute by the Civil War, is forced by her family into marriage with a wealthy upstart. Ten years after her marriage and the end of the war, she watches her husband, Eli, die from a horrifying blood fever. Newly widowed, Augusta begins to wake to the realities that surround her: her social standing is stained by her marriage, she is alone and unprotected in a community that is being destroyed by racial prejudice and violence, the fortune she thought she would inherit does not exist, and the deadly blood fever is spreading like wildfire.



About the Author

Taylor M. Polites

Taylor M. Polites' first novel, The Rebel Wife, was published by Simon & Schuster in February 2012. It was featured as a top ten pick in the February 2012 issue of O Magazine, the Oprah magazine, and was an Okra Pick from the Southern Independent Booksellers Association. His work has appeared in the anthologies Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (W.W. Norton, November 2013) and the upcoming Providence Noir (Akashic Books) as well as in local and regional arts and news publications including Provincetown Arts, artscope, and the Cape Codder. He graduated from the Wilkes University MFA in Creative Writing program in June 2010, where he was awarded the Norris Church Mailer Fellowship. He teaches in the Wilkes University Creative Writing MFA program, at Roger Williams University and the Rhode Island School of Design. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his small Chihuahua Clovis.



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