2006 "First Edition" stated on copyright page; Alfred A. Knopf publishers, New York; hardbound; very good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket very good.
 
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Liberty Fish is the son of two passionate abolitionists but whose grandparents were cruel slave-owners. The plot follows him from his birth to young adulthood, his enlistment in the Union army, and his quest to find his grandparents who he blames for the despair his mother feels. The tone has hints of dark humor and at times can be heavily surreal.
 
Thus follows a childhood limned with fugitive slaves moving through hidden passageways in the house, his Uncle Potter’s free-soil adventure stories whose remarkable violence sets the tone of the mounting national crisis, and the inevitable distress that befalls his mother whenever letters arrive from her parents—a conflict that ultimately costs her her life and compels Liberty, in hopes of reconciling the familial disunion, to escape first into the cauldron of war and then into a bedlam more disturbing still.