Husbands and wives. Sons and daughters. Soldiers and surgeons. Free men and slaves. Widows and ghosts. The long dead come alive again in this epic novel of a widow struggling to keep her family together amid the carnage of the Battle of Gettysburg. It is summer, 1863, and the war has come home to the Gamble farm in Southern Pennsylvania. With her husband buried under the willow tree in the back yard, newly-widowed Purdy Gamble must cope with renewed loss when a rebel surgeon conscripts her farm for use as a Confederate hospital. Hannah, Purdy's daughter, disappears into the chaos of war to chase her own ghosts, both imaginary and real. And then there are the twins Loli and Coal, just fourteen. One, struck dumb by a mule kick at age five, will find a disturbing peace amid the flames of war. The other will twice save a man's life, unearthing a family secret in the process-a secret at once as alive as warm flesh and as dead as cold bones moldering under the ground.