Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Nostalgia: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Nostalgia: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Nostalgia: A Novel
    Ebook430 pages7 hours

    Nostalgia: A Novel

    By Dennis McFarland

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    This stunning Civil War novel from best-selling author Dennis McFarland brings us the journey of a nineteen-year-old private, abandoned by his comrades in the Wilderness, who is struggling to regain his voice, his identity, and his place in a world utterly changed by what he has experienced on the battlefield.
     
    In the winter of 1864, Summerfield Hayes, a pitcher for the famous Eckford Club, enlists in the Union army, leaving his sister, a schoolteacher, devastated and alone in their Brooklyn home. The siblings, who have lost both their parents, are unusually attached, and Hayes fears his untoward secret feelings for his sister. This rich backstory is intercut with scenes of his soul-altering hours on the march and at the front—the slaughter of barely grown young men who only days before whooped it up with him in a regimental ball game; his temporary deafness and disorientation after a shell blast; his fevered attempt to find safe haven after he has been deserted by his own comrades—and, later, in a Washington military hospital, where he finds himself mute and unable even to write his name. In this twilit realm, among the people he encounters—including a compassionate drug-addicted amputee, the ward matron who only appears to be his enemy, and the captain who is convinced that Hayes is faking his illness—is a gray-bearded eccentric who visits the ward daily and becomes Hayes’s strongest advocate: Walt Whitman. This timeless story, whose outcome hinges on friendships forged in crisis, reminds us that the injuries of war are manifold, and the healing goodness in the human soul runs deep and strong.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateOct 1, 2013
    ISBN9780307908353
    Unavailable
    Nostalgia: A Novel
    Author

    Dennis McFarland

    Dennis McFarland is a bestselling author of novels and stories. His short fiction has appeared in the American Scholar, the New Yorker, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where he has also taught creative writing. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife, writer and poet Michelle Blake.

    Read more from Dennis Mc Farland

    Related to Nostalgia

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Memoirs Of A Fox

      Jan 1, 2019

      My year of graduate work in Cambridge, England was a somewhat bleak and desperate affair, coinciding with a bout of depression that could perhaps have been shortened or ameliorated if I had been assigned hard agricultural labor, a daily column of loc

      14 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Dec 15, 2022

      Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      An Ardent And Capable Defender

      Jan 2, 2020

      An Ardent And Capable Defender
      5 min read

    • Article

      Sport

      Sep 20, 2023

      Sport
      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 13, 2020

      Write to: The Editor, The Field, Pinehurst II, Pinehurst Road, Farnborough Business Park, Farnborough, Hampshire GU14 7BF. Email: field.secretary@futurenet.com LETTERS MAY BE EDITED FOR CLARITY OR SPACE Dr Hannah Clark’s article was excellent [Huntin

      7 min read

    • Article

      Conflicts Of Interest

      Aug 10, 2023

      When it comes to fictional world war I veterans who could occupy this platform, we’re spoilt for choice. Biggles, the protagonist of W. E. Johns’ series of adventure books, might be deemed as worthy of the slot as he was awarded the Distinguished Ser

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters To The Editor

      Apr 18, 2024

      Letters To The Editor
      6 min read

    • Article

      Carry On Laughing

      Jun 29, 2022

      Carry On Laughing
      5 min read

    • Article

      Summer Book Reviews

      Dec 1, 2023

      by David Grann Published by Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781398513341 $24.99 That unholiest of trinities – oil, money and murder – are reprised in this painstakingly investigated and riveting account by an award-winning journalist and author, recently rele

      4 min read

    • Article

      Thanks For Coming

      Oct 2, 2019

      Thanks For Coming
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Modest Man

      Oct 17, 2019

      The Modest Man
      5 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Terror From The Skies

      Oct 6, 2022

      Terror From The Skies
      4 min read

    • Article

      Knee Deep In Shared Water

      Mar 1, 2022

      Knee Deep In Shared Water
      7 min read

    • Article

      Gettysburg

      Oct 27, 2021

      Gettysburg
      16 min read

    • Article

      Looking For The Light

      May 3, 2020

      Looking For The Light
      7 min read

    • Article

      Classical Corner

      Jun 15, 2023

      Classical Corner
      5 min read

    • Article

      Around The World In 100 Plants

      Oct 26, 2022

      Simon Barnes (Simon & Schuster, £30) WE have become used, in recent years, to the convention of 100 short essays as a means of raising the reader’s eyebrows and setting away a never-ending series of big ideas from the starting point of an everyday o

      5 min read

    • Article

      Inside the Billionaire Bohemian Club

      Feb 22, 2024

      Inside the Billionaire Bohemian Club
      7 min read

    • Article

      Must See, Must Read

      Jul 24, 2018

      Must See, Must Read
      11 min read

    • Article

      Visit Beautiful Mars

      May 1, 2023

      Visit Beautiful Mars
      10 min read

    • Article

      All Hail The Quail

      Mar 25, 2020

      All Hail The Quail
      4 min read

    • Article

      FALL & REDEMPTION

      Nov 13, 2019

      FALL & REDEMPTION
      12 min read

    • Article

      Inside the Billionaire Bohemian Club

      Feb 22, 2024

      Inside the Billionaire Bohemian Club
      7 min read

    Reviews for Nostalgia

    4/5

    11 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This novel switches around between a few separate (though adjacent) time periods: Summerfield’s life at home right before he enlists in the army, his time spent as a private before and during his first battle, and the events that occur after he is abandoned on the battlefield and ends up in a military hospital. I’ve never encountered this type of narrative arrangement before, but I loved it. McFarland’s transitions between the time periods are smooth and keep the story moving along briskly. At times, it felt like pieces of a puzzle were falling into place as small details that had seemed insignificant in one time period suddenly had more meaning in another time period. The disjointed nature of it seemed fitting for a story about PTSD—it reflects the way a PTSD sufferer’s memories might be disrupted and scattered. McFarland’s writing is fantastic. His descriptions are concise, yet filled with carefully chosen, vivid details that bring the scenes to life in the reader’s mind. I even found myself going back to reread some passages because they were so beautifully written. The descriptions of battle and the military hospital are horrific—as they should be. The ghastly deaths and injuries Summerfield witnesses emphasize the shocking and staggering waste and brutality of war, and make his development of PTSD completely understandable and all the more heartbreaking. The portrayal of Summerfield’s PTSD—imagined injuries and pain, flashbacks, visual and auditory delusions, losing his ability to speak and write—was fascinating. I’m not a PTSD expert, but I’m interested in it and have read about it, and would recommend this book for anyone wanting an idea of what it’s like.Summerfield has a lot of depth as a character. His love for baseball is a reminder that he’s just a normal young man who had a life (and a bright future) before the war. A constant tension arises from his “unnatural” feelings for his older sister, which caused him to enlist in the military to get away from home. His kindness and sympathy toward, and companionship with, the other soldiers endeared me to him. The always looming possibility of him being accused of desertion and executed kept me on edge.Overall, this was a brilliant, gripping novel. I plan to read more works by this author even if they aren’t the type of stories I’d typically read—he’s that good.Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.