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  • 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
Reeds and Sedges: A Novel of Confucius

Reeds and Sedges: A Novel of Confucius

Gallantine, Daniel

Paperback

Series: Great Historical Lives: Series 1, Ancient Civilisations, Book 11

Fiction Anthologies

ISBN13: 9798191746722
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 14 2026
Pages: 162
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Confucius is the eleventh life in the Ancient Civilisations series. He spent fourteen years searching for a ruler who would actually use him, found none, and died believing he had failed. He was wrong about almost nothing else, and wrong about that.

Born to a once-prominent but financially diminished family in the small state of Lu, Confucius rose through genuine talent and patient self-education to a remarkable government career: town governor, then Minister of Works, then the considerably more consequential Minister of Crime. This included the genuinely disputed execution of a fellow minister, an episode this novel addresses with full honesty about the real ancient and modern disagreement over whether the charges were legitimate or factional convenience. Disillusioned when Duke Ding's attention drifted toward gifts and diversion rather than serious governance, Confucius left Lu around 497 BC at fifty-five, beginning fourteen years of wandering across several states in search of a ruler genuinely receptive to his vision of moral government.

Those years produced some of the most vivid, well-documented episodes of his life: a controversial visit to the politically influential Nanzi that troubled his loyal disciple Zilu, a dangerous mistaken-identity confrontation at Kuang, and the deepening of his bond with his beloved student Yan Hui, whose simple, devoted response after a near-fatal separation (that he would not dare die while his teacher still lived) anchors one of the most genuinely moving relationships in the entire historical record. A seven-day siege between Chen and Cai brought Confucius and his disciples to the edge of starvation, weathered with a composure this novel renders as hard-won discipline rather than effortless serenity.

Returning to Lu at nearly seventy with his core political ambition still unrealized, Confucius spent his final years absorbing three devastating losses in rapid succession: his son, his beloved Yan Hui, and his loyal, reckless disciple Zilu, even as his teaching continued, undiminished, until his death in 479 BC. He died, by every honest account, genuinely uncertain that his life's work had achieved any lasting significance, decades before the gradual, contested compilation of his sayings into the Analects, and centuries before that text became the foundation of a tradition shaping Chinese governance and society for two and a half thousand years.

This novel follows Confucius from an impoverished childhood through a brief, disillusioning government career, fourteen years of wandering in search of a worthy ruler, and a series of devastating late-life losses borne with hard-won composure, through to a death that closes on the precise, quiet irony history alone could supply: a man who never knew that everything he believed he had failed to accomplish would, within a few centuries, become one of the most influential ethical traditions the world has ever produced.

A vivid, deeply humanizing reconstruction of the teacher whose own lifetime political ambitions were consistently frustrated, and who died without ever learning how completely history would eventually prove him wrong about that.

Reeds and Sedges is the eleventh novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.

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Gallantine, Daniel

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