Seventeen and One

Elizabeth McClanahan built everything she had from nothing. Orphaned at four, married at eighteen to a man as quiet and landless as herself, she walked west with him into Missouri and raised ten children on ground they cleared with their own hands. Every bit of it earned. None of it given.Then the war came for her sons.On September 27, 1864, outside a town called Centralia, Missouri, four hundred guerrilla horsemen rode out of the timber and into the worst single day of atrocity in the Missouri war. The killing on that field took three minutes. The consequences lasted the rest of their lives.In the tradition of Cold Mountain and Woe to Live OnSeventeen and One is a novel built from five real lives caught in the Centralia Massacre — the soldier who enlisted, the officer who led his men onto that field, the sergeant pulled from an execution line, the guerrilla captain who survived it, and the mother who waited thirty-five years to file for a son's pension she collected six times before she died.A story of family survival, set inside a war that had stopped having rules.Content advisory: This novel depicts documented historical violence including the execution of unarmed prisoners and battlefield mutilation. Read more