Jerry Gabriel's first novel, Deserters, was published in May 2026 (Acre Books). He is the author of two collections of stories, The Let Go (Queen's Ferry Press, 2015) and Drowned Boy (Sarabande, 2010), which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick, and was awarded the 2011 Towson Prize for Literature. His stories have appeared in One Story, Epoch, Fiction, The Missouri Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has received grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2004), the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (2011), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2016). He lives in Maryland with his family and teaches writing at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
A clerical error has placed Robert Riley’s name on a list of men who have committed a particularly abhorrent form of desertion from the Union Army: bounty jumping. President Lincoln has said that such men—those who have cheated the system by accepting signing bonuses, or "bounties," for multiple enlistments—should be hanged.
It is fall 1864, and Riley has in fact deserted, though just the ordinary way, and is in flight toward the territories, having collected his two sons from their homestead in Southern Ohio, as well as an orphaned girl he met on his way across the Appalachians. As the four move across the lower Midwest, they are pursued by a surly private detective who seeks the reward for bringing Riley in. With the man eventually on their heels, they are forced to divert by train into Chicago, where Riley knows a place to hide. And it is here, in this cold and dangerous metropolis, in the weeks leading up to the 1864 election, that things begin to unravel for the party.
You can read more about Deserters on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.
From Deserters
From Chapter 3
Robert Riley woke in a panic, blood drumming in his ears and throat. He saw Abigail holding infant Michael, shushing him to sleep. Abigail, he thought. And then: Michael.
He rose to his sweaty elbows, gripped by an urgency. Outside, the swampy August din of the Tidewater: deafening crickets and a dozen kinds of frogs. At least three of the men in the tent snored loudly.
He dressed and quietly gathered his bedroll and knapsack. Marcus Trask stirred from the rustling and opened an eye, catching Robert’s own for a beat, neither judgment nor envy fully in his gaze, but possibly some blend of those things. Robert shrugged back his own complicated feelings—he had eighteen months ahead of him still and knew the risk. He slipped out into the muggy night.
It was foggy and moonless. There was no trouble getting past the watch. Rarely did a runner get chased these days, anyway. He pointed himself far to the east of Richmond, the big Rebel guns blasting away miles behind him, ineffectual but for the disruption of sleep. He made a wide arc around the city, reversing the trip south months before, when, even before the arrival of the letters, the ill-feeling had first crept in and darkened his usually imperturbable mood. This hadn’t gone unnoticed.
"She ain’t paying the neighbors any visits, like in your head," one man joked at chow.
Robert barely knew him, and though he offered an inscrutable smile, he weighed whether or not braining the man would be worth the punishment. His fellow soldier, of course, could not know how freighted the reference to Robert’s dead wife was. But that’s why you didn’t speak of such things to strangers.
As they had inched south that summer, the hardship of the war and all its uncertainty was abetted by the sweltering days and the close nights. On the march, it had in fact been less Abigail on his mind than the boys. With time to think, he worried about them, and particularly about their future.
In moments of honesty, he admitted that Sean had already slipped his grasp. Even before Robert had joined the fight in February of ’63, the conflict between them had come out into the open. It was in part his own fault, he knew, for taking too severe an approach. But Sean’s zeal, his righteousness, had a hand, too. Sean already considered himself beyond Hollis—he was, he thought, a scientist—yet he was still a boy, making a boy’s many mistakes. Even so, with Sean, Robert at least understood the contours.
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