THE KNAPSACK ROAD: SEVEN STORIES OF RECONSTRUCTION TEXAS

He walked home from Virginia with a dead man’s knapsack and nothing else.Texas, 1865. Jacob Turner returns from four years of war to find his farm occupied by Sarah Briggs, a widow with two young sons, who has nowhere else to go. Before he can reclaim his land, a sharp-suited speculator files an abandonment claim, and Jacob has five days to contest it, or lose everything he walked eleven hundred miles to reach.The knapsack on his shoulder belonged to Eli Briggs, Sarah’s husband. A man Jacob knew at Petersburg. A man he watched die.Set in the raw months of Reconstruction, when land titles, loyalty, and identity were all contested ground, The Knapsack Road is a story about grief, honor, and the question of what a man owes the dead. Jacob must choose between the land that kept him walking for a thousand miles and the people who now make it worth keeping, while Tuwihtua, a young Comanche warrior, traces his own reckoning with a frontier that is shrinking beneath his feet.Spare, morally precise, and deeply human, this novel asks who truly owns a place, and whether belonging is something you claim or something you earn.For readers of Paulette Jiles, Larry McMurtry, and Ron Rash. Read more