num_pages: 352
description: A stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller Walking to Gatlinburg is a spellbinding story of survival wilderness adventure mystery and love in the time of war.Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County Vermont is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.Its 1864 and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence Jesse is murdered and thus begins Morgans unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem.Along the way Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters including a weeping elephant a pacifist gunsmith a woman who lives in a tree a blind cobbler and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him  how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.
language: English
title: Walking to Gatlinburg
publisher: Shaye Areheart Books