As the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the war, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.

From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. To evoke him, Brooks turned to the journals and letters of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May's father—a friend and confidant of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In her telling, March emerges as an idealistic chaplain in the little known backwaters of a war that will test his faith in himself and in the Union cause as he learns that his side, too, is capable of acts of barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near mortal illness, he must reassemble his shattered mind and body and find a way to reconnect with a wife and daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.

Spanning the vibrant intellectual world of Concord and the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott's optimistic children's tale to portray the moral complexity of war, and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism—and by a dangerous and illicit attraction. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks's place as an internationally renowned author of historical fiction.

杰拉尔丁·布鲁克斯（Geraldine Brooks,1955-）生于悉尼，是拥有澳大利亚和美国双重国籍的女作家，她曾先后在《悉尼先驱晨报》和《华尔街日报》担任资深记者，长期对国际热点问题进行采访和报道，她把这一职业称为自己“创作的图书馆”。

除了《马奇》这部获普利策奖的小说，布鲁克斯根据真实历史事件创作的处女作《奇迹之年》2001年在美国出版后同样好评如潮，随即成为澳大利亚政府推荐全民阅读的年度佳作。布鲁克斯现与丈夫及儿子居住在美国弗吉尼亚州乡村。