Elm Creek #17
Dutton
March 2011
On Sale: February 22, 2011
Featuring: Anneke Bergstrom; Constance Wright; Dorothea Granger
352 pages ISBN: 0525952039 EAN: 9780525952039 Hardcover Add to Wish List
The New York Times bestselling author of the Elm
Creek Quilts series joins the Dutton list with a Civil
War-era tale of love and sacrifice behind Union lines.
With The Union Quilters, Chiaverini delivers a
powerful story of a remarkable group of women coping with
changing roles and the extraordinary experiences of the
Civil War.
In 1862 Water's Ford, Pennsylvania,
abolitionism is prevalent, even passionate, so the local men
rally to answer Mr. Lincoln's call to arms. Thus the women
of Elm Creek Valley's quilting bee are propelled into the
unknown.
Constance Wright, married to Abel, a skilled
sharpshooter courageous enough to have ventured south to buy
his wife's freedom from a Virginia plantation, knows well
her husband's certainty that all people, enslaved and free,
North and South, need colored men like him to fight for a
greater purpose. Sisters-in-law Dorothea Nelson and
Charlotte Granger wish safe passage for their learned
husbands. Schoolmaster turned farmer Thomas carries
Dorothea's Dove in the Window quilt with him. Charlotte's
husband, Dr. Jonathan Granger, takes more than a doctor's
bag to his post at a field hospital. Alongside the devotion
of his wife, pregnant with their second child, Jonathan
brings the promise he made to his unrequited love, Gerda
Bergstrom: "My first letter will be to you."
Together
with the other members of the circle, the women support one
another through loneliness and fear, and devise an ingenious
business plan to keep Water's Ford functioning. That plan
may forever alter the patchwork of town life in ways that
transcend even the ultimate sacrifices of war.