Jarrettsville is a novel based on the author's family history. It opens in 1869 after Martha Jane Carnes has just shot and killed her fiancé in front of fifty witnesses and former Union militia members. To find out why she did it, the story steps back to 1865, six days after the Confederate surrender and President Lincoln has been assassinated. Martha Jane is loyal to her Confederate family but in love with the Union hero, Nicholas McComas, and after discovering that her brother belongs to the same Rebel militia as John Wilkes Booth, they must keep their affair a secret.

Nixon has ghosts to exorcise here. Jarrettsville is an embroidery of imagination on a true piece of her family history, sewn together from old family papers and letters, newspaper accounts and graveyard records. But the story, as vivid as it is, is overshadowed by an even more looming ghost in the nation's family history: the legacy of racism.

Cornelia Nixon is an award-winning short story writer and the author of two previous novels.  Cornelia Nixon was born in Boston, Massachusetts and spent many happy summers on the "Big Farm" described in her novel, Jarrettsville. Her book on D.H. Lawrence was her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, and since then she has written only fiction, including now three novels and numerous short stories. Her stories have won prizes, including the First Prize O. Henry Award in 1995, another O. Henry in 1993, two Pushcart Prizes (1996 and 2003), a Nelson Algren Award in 1988, and the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction in 1991. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society. She is married to poet Dean Young, lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the MFA program at Mills College.