'It was essential to me to write about the Union army-my ancestors were Union soldiers. Most of books about the Civil War are told from the 'romantic' Southern side we asked why he chose the 'prosaic' side. And I started to hit my stride when I began investigating these central issues of our national psyche, which are still unfurling.' She informed my ideas of Ash's mother-a totemic figure, fiercely present.' As is Ash.Ībout a man writing about a woman, he said: 'I had a chance to be flexible and inventive-I'm a stranger in a strange land. She was born on an Indiana farm I lived there with my mother through my adolescence.

I also used some of my grandmother's turns of phrase when she reminisced about her grandparents. We spoke to Hunt about his remarkable novel, and asked about Ash's precise, vivid voice: she 'sewed at it until the stitch stayed shut' 'An inch or two before dawn' 'she was fierce happy.' Hunt said, 'I was very careful not to write her voice the way voices were reproduced in fiction of that time, so I read numerous journals and letters from the Civil War period. Like the central job of it was we were fixing to fire at ourselves.' Her comrades know Ash as 'a slight man, handy with a rifle.' Hunt uses Ash's powerful voice to make the nightmare of the war tangible: 'You couldn't see the colors, you would have thought it was a mirror. Laird Hunt's Neverhome (reviewed below) is the story of an unforgettable woman, Ash Thompson, who joins the Union army during the Civil War.

Chitty chitty bang bang 1964