What is Nancy Peacock reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Nancy Peacock, author of The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

Her entry begins:

I usually keep a memoir or novel going while also reading a nonfiction book.

Recently I finished Barefoot to Avalon, David Payne’s amazing memoir about his relationship to his brother, George A., and his relationship to his brother’s death. George A. died in a car crash while helping David move from Vermont to North Carolina.

I can’t give this book a glowing-enough review. The emotional work Payne had to have done in order to write the story is...[read on]

About The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson, from the publisher:

For fans of Cold Mountain and The Invention of Wings comes “a tour de force of historical fiction” (Henry Wiencek, author of Master of the Mountain) that follows the epic journey of a slave-turned-Comanche warrior who travels from the brutality of a New Orleans sugar cane plantation to the indomitable frontier of an untamed Texas, searching not only for the woman he loves but so too for his own identity.

I have been to hangings before, but never my own.

Sitting in a jail cell on the eve of his hanging, April 1, 1875, freedman Persimmon “Persy” Wilson wants nothing more than to leave some record of the truth—his truth. He may be guilty, but not of what he stands accused: the kidnapping and rape of his former master’s wife.

In 1860, Persy had been sold to Sweetmore, a Louisiana sugar plantation, alongside a striking, light-skinned house slave named Chloe. Their deep and instant connection fueled a love affair and inspired plans to escape their owner, Master Wilson, who claimed Chloe as his concubine. But on the eve of the Union Army’s attack on New Orleans, Wilson shot Persy, leaving him for dead, and fled with Chloe and his other slaves to Texas. So began Persy’s journey across the frontier, determined to reunite with his lost love. Along the way, he would be captured by the Comanche, his only chance of survival to prove himself fierce and unbreakable enough to become a warrior. His odyssey of warfare, heartbreak, unlikely friendships, and newfound family would change the very core of his identity and teach him the meaning and the price of freedom.

Visit Nancy Peacock's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

The Page 69 Test: The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson.

Writers Read: Nancy Peacock.

--Marshal Zeringue