A Great Length of Time

2017 Oregon Book Award for Fiction

Assigned as a nurse to a hospital ship during the Civil War, Dr. Rose Barnett hopes someone will apprentice her in the modern art of surgery. But she has more to learn than how to amputate the ruined limbs of Union soldiers. Confronted by her own preconceived notions of class, love, and race, she struggles to untangle life’s persistent contradictions. As a pacifist, her greatest challenge is coming to grips with the terrible ironies of war. As a woman, her challenge is to follow her heart. Based on the true story of a woman doctor in the American Civil War, A Great Length of Time is a woman’s view of the politics and gender roles of the day, offering a fresh look at the war and the women who nursed its soldiers.

"This is the Civil War as we have never seen it, drenched in the heat and blood and smells of the hospital ship Despain, where the lone woman surgeon Rose Barnett - bright, determined, unshrinking, standing her ground in a man's world – labors to salvage the destroyed bodies of young soldiers. Profoundly moving, vivid and authentic, unflinching, absolutely convincing in voice and imagery, this is a remarkable book, and I won't soon forget it." Molly Gloss, author of Hearts of Horses 

"A special pleasure of this powerful tale lies in the language and brutal images of Civil War medicine. Meanwhile, the national shame of slavery ever simmers about the characters as they play their public roles and confront their private secrets. The result is an engrossing slice of American history and a new vision of our past. Joyce Cherry Cresswell's language is ever lush, and convincingly evocative of the period. Just now, as our country finds itself in another kind of civil war, the entire tale resonates with truths we need to hear. In this sense, Cresswell sits in close company with the works of Lepore, Kearns Goodwin and McCullough." Roger Paget, Institutional Professor Emeritus, Lewis and Clark College

A Great Length of Time explores the difficult question, "why is there war?" War and conflict have held deep fascination for Cherry Cresswell ever since she listened to her parents’ stories from WWII and later watched friends ship out to Vietnam, some of whom did not return. She has long been a Civil War buff and a fan of its rich literature. Cherry Cresswell has published previously in Oregon Humanities Magazine and the Portland Oregonian. She once wrote a sequel to Stuart Little, which many third graders report is pretty cool. Her crooked path included working as a trial lawyer and non-profit executive director before retiring to write full time in 2010.

The author says: "A Great Length of Time is based loosely on the life of a woman I have come to call my great-grandmother. I never met her, but her impact on my family was immense. That’s my next book!"