This copy has been SIGNED by Allen Gurganus on the title page. A major literary event ...an astonishing first novel of the South from the Civil War to the present, in the voice of a woman who lived through it all. Luch Marsden is the widow of the Civil War's last surviving soldier; she is now half-blind, ninety-nine years old, locked into a charity home, and very talkative. Here is her own Homeric epic, a darkly comuc tale that straddles two centuries and forgives neither.