The Line Uncrossed with Bonus Stories

In the autumn of 1860, Levi Anderson is thirteen years old, invisible in his own family, and happiest alone by the creek with a borrowed book. When the war comes, it takes his brothers first. What it leaves behind is worse than what it takes.

Beaten by the brother who stays, rescued by the sister who acts, Levi enlists in the 6th Indiana Infantry at fourteen, lying about his age to escape the only home he has ever known. He fights at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga, where a bullet tears open his face and Confederate soldiers take him prisoner.

What follows is Andersonville.

Thirty-three thousand men. A stockade. A creek turned to poison. A wooden rail called the dead line, beyond which the guards will shoot without warning. And a friendship with a man named Jim Dearborn that becomes the only thing worth holding on to — and the hardest thing to lose.

The Line Uncrossed is a novel about what a boy sees when everything is taken from him, and what he carries home when the war gives him back. Inspired by the true experience of a fourteen-year-old Indiana soldier who survived the worst place on earth and spent the next forty years teaching other people's children how to read.

Direct buyers of The Line Uncrossed receive a free companion volume, Three Stories from the World of The Line Uncrossed, available as both EPUB and PDF.

It contains two new stories set in the novel's world. The Pen tells how Henry Pollard, a clerk in an Indianapolis law office, walked to a recruiting table in the late summer of 1861 to talk a neighbor's boy out of enlisting, and walked away enlisted himself, by way of a sergeant, a steel-nib dip pen, and a mouth his father had warned him about for twenty years. The Monster in the Man takes a single day in August of 1864 inside the headquarters tent of Henry Wirz, the Swiss-born commandant of Andersonville Prison, as he writes the morning's letter to a government that has stopped answering.

Alongside these, the volume includes Ambrose Bierce's Chickamauga, one of the finest short stories ever written about the American Civil War. Bierce was a twenty-one-year-old topographical officer on that field on September 20, 1863, the day Levi Anderson was captured.

Three stories. The same war. Approached from three different directions, by three different men, on the same ground, in the same five years that broke and made the country.

Free with purchase. Not sold separately.

Paperback and Hardcover editions will be available on May 22, 2026 at Amazon.com and BN.com