num_pages: 288
description: From New York Times-bestselling author James Lee Burke comes a novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana as the South transforms and a brilliant cast of characters  enslaved and free women plantation gentry and battle-weary Confederate and Union soldiers  are caught in the maelstromIn the fall of 1863 the Union army is in control of the Mississippi river. Much of Louisiana including New Orleans and Baton Rouge is occupied. The Confederate army is in disarray corrupt structures are falling apart and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom.When Hannah Laveau a formerly enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation is accused of murder she goes on the run with Florence Milton an abolitionist schoolteacher dodging the local constable and the slavecatchers that prowl the bayous. Wade Lufkin haunted by what he observedand didas a surgeon on the battlefield has returned to his uncles plantation to convalesce where he becomes enraptured by Hannah. Flags on the Bayou is an engaging action-packed narrative that includes a duel that ends in disaster a brutal encounter with the local Union commander repeated skirmishes with Confederate irregulars led by a diseased and probably deranged colonel and a powerful story of love blossoming between an unlikely pair. As the story unfolds it illuminates a past that reflects our present in sharp relief.
language: English
title: Flags on the Bayou
publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press