New Release! Brookhaven

with a fascinating note from the author

Brookhaven has arrived! It’s a historical romance set in the American Civil War period. A beautiful and intriguing story, by Glynn Young, it pulls you in and doesn’t let you go.

We thought you might enjoy hearing the Author’s Note from Glynn, which gives you a little backstory—and, of course, some of the author’s thanks.

When I was seven years old, my mother took me to see the movie The Horse Soldiers, starring John Wayne and William Holden. It’s the story of a Union cavalry troop of almost 2,000 soldiers who slice their way across Confederate territory. Little did I know that it was based on a true story, called Grierson’s Raid, and that the raid had been experienced by my ancestors in 1863, when they lived in the Brookhaven, Mississippi area.

Brookhaven began as a family story about my great-grandfather, handed down by my grandfather to my father to me. The story was accompanied by the family bible, passed down in the same way.

The story was that my great-grandfather Samuel had been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d been too young to serve as a soldier. When the war ended, he was stranded somewhere in the eastern United States, with Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia or William Johnston’s army in North Carolina.

He made his way home to Brookhaven, Mississippi, mostly on foot, to discover that the family had left for Texas to escape federal occupation, so he continued his journey until he found them.

It was a great story, but it turned out to be mostly invented. An example: my great-grandfather had been a messenger boy, but not in the army. Messenger boys were the young teens who brought telegrams to families telling them of their relative’s death in battle. They were not involved in military battles.

But the larger story was what my family believed and went to their graves believing. (My grandmother was still fighting the Civil War, or what she called the War of Northern Aggression, when she died in 1984.) The real story wasn’t anywhere near as interesting as the invented one, and it was the invented one that I imagined for Brookhaven. That invented story, however, is based on years of research, study, and reading. The characters are all fictitious, but what they experience in the story really happened to people during and after the war.

Books don’t appear by themselves, and L.L. Barkat and Sara Barkat at T. S. Poetry Press were instrumental in making this book happen. My family, including my wife Janet, has put up with a lot while I was writing. I’ve had numerous private conversations with people about battles, historical figures, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction period. A special thanks goes to the writers and editors of the Emerging Civil War website.

I learned something important through this book. Our ancestors may not be the great heroes we thought they were, but living through a cataclysm like the Civil War and its aftermath is a heroic act all by itself.

—Glynn Young, St. Louis, Missouri, November 2024

read more about Brookhaven, a Civil War historical romance