This is fiction of a high caliber. . . . Voices in the Dead House is on the cutting edge of history, providing us with a way to grapple with our evolving sense of the past, as we wonder what is next.
Voices in the Dead House
After the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.
Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset by prejudice and at war with itself.
Big Other Book Award Finalist
Library Journal “Historical Fiction Titles To Share with Readers” selection
Kirkus Reviews “New Novels With a Literary Pedigree” selection
Foreword Reviews “Book of the Day” selection
The Millions “Most Anticipated Books” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276024
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276017
Listen to Norman Lock discuss Voices in the Dead House and his American Novels cycle on Carl Rollyson’s A Life in Biography podcast.
Watch Norman Lock read from Voices in the Dead House for the Big Other Book Awards.
Norman Lock is the author of The Old Man and the Heath: A Novel and Stories (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in March 2027), the dozen volumes of The American Novels series, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and additional novels, short fiction, poetry, and stage and radio plays. Among other honors, he has won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and has been longlisted three times for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.
visit author page »Praise for Voices in the Dead House
A simply riveting read by Norman Lock—an author with a genuine flair for originality and the kind of narrative storytelling style that fully engages the reader from first page to last.
— Midwest Book Review