Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Long November: A Novel of Friendship, Duty, and the Battle of the Wabash

The Long November: A Novel of Friendship, Duty, and the Battle of the Wabash

Bailey, John

Paperback

General FictionHistorical Fiction

ISBN13: 9798190447743
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 3 2026
Pages: 210
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In the autumn of 1791, three young men from a German settlement in western Pennsylvania answer the new republic's call and march into the Northwest Territory with General Arthur St. Clair's army. Jacob Bauer is a blacksmith's son, quiet and methodical, who reads the ground around him the way he reads iron. Eli Schaeffer is the miller's son, warm and quick, whose easy charm conceals a steadiness that only reveals itself under pressure. Nathan Reist is the schoolmaster's son, bookish and earnest, who has read everything available about the territory and the confederation they are marching to meet-and who understands, more clearly than any of them, what they are walking toward.

On the fourth of November, 1791, they find out.

The Battle of the Wabash-known to history as St. Clair's Defeat-remains the worst defeat ever suffered by the United States Army at the hands of a Native American confederation, a catastrophe born of inadequate preparation, corrupt supply contracts, and a commander who had been warned explicitly what the wilderness required and could not, in the end, provide it. The confederation force under the brilliant Miami war chief Mihsihkinaahkwa-Little Turtle-had been watching the column for weeks. They chose the hour and the ground, and they were not wrong.

The Long November follows Jacob, Eli, and Nathan through the campaign and its aftermath: the road-cutting and the short rations and the first desertions, the four of November itself and what it demanded of each of them, the brutal retreat through the Ohio country and the weeks at Fort Jefferson while Nathan fought fever and Jacob refused to leave. And then, across the years that followed-the return home, the marriages, Nathan's book, the slow arc of the republic learning from what had been lost-the novel asks what it means to survive something and carry it, and what the men who did not survive were owed by the nation they served.

Written in the tradition of American historical fiction at its most serious-plain prose, honest about cost, heroic where heroism is earned and not where it is not-The Long November is a novel about friendship as the most durable form of courage, about the difference between duty written on paper and duty owed to the man beside you, and about the particular kind of gratitude available only to those who have been somewhere that showed them what home was worth.

Also from

Bailey, John

View All

Also in

Historical Fiction

View All