G.S. Simmons - author

Author of:-

Confessions of a Civil War EmbalmerLifeline

Books:

CONFESSIONS OF A CIVIL WAR EMBALMER

CONFESSIONS OF A CIVIL WAR EMBALMER is a 89,000-word historical novel about an enslaved woman who disguises herself as a man to survive the Civil War.
"I reckon there ain't nothing more useless in life than a dead body… Of course there always be exceptions. Even for a corpse. One set me free."
Augustine Kane grows up on a Virginia plantation, daughter of its healer and playmate of the Master’s son. When a new master takes over, he replaces the plantation’s field crops for slave babies. Ensnared, Augustine exacts revenge, runs, and joins the Union Army disguised as August, a man.
Her doctoring skills carry her from burial detail to embalmer. When she saves Captain Robert T. Hall's arm from amputation, she becomes his orderly, and not just because of his feelings toward August. But love is a luxury she can't afford, especially with a sergeant watching her every move.
When Hall, now aware of August’s secret, proposes faking his death so they can start a life together, she agrees even through discovery means the rope.
I believe CONFESSIONS OF A CIVIL WAR EMBALMER will appeal to readers of Percival Everett's JAMES and Brit Bennett's THE VANISHING HALF.
I'm a white, British-born, Jewish man raised in the UK and Canada and have no personal or familial experience of slavery, but I have researched extensively. August’s voice is built from an amalgamation of testimony and oral slave histories. It took forty drafts of the first page to hone it. Once I had it, I couldn’t abandon it.Currently on submission

LIFELINE

San Estere, California, 1996.Fourteen-year-old Juno Gold has never felt like she belongs. Not at school, not at home, and not even in her own family.Her mother, Lydia, has been in a coma since before Juno was born.Her father is a distant, ghostlike figure. Raised by image-conscious grandparents, Juno has learned to live with absence.When a stroke pushes the family into a court fight over her life support, Juno is quietly rooting for the machines to lose.Then a routine test reveals the impossible. Lydia is pregnant .The scandal cracks open every story Juno has ever been told. About her mother, her father, her heritage, even her own name. The only person willing to help her uncover these buried truths is Doña Lucrécia, the neighborhood curandera, who has spent five years waiting for Juno to ask the right questions.Blending quiet magic with psychological realism, LifeLine explores themes of identity, inheritance, and the cost of not knowing where, or who, you come from.Recently completed. Submitting soon.

About

G.S. Simmons was born in London, England, trained as a dentist, and has spent most of his life practicing in Southern California.For eight years he wrote a column on American dentistry for the Royal College of Surgeons' Faculty Dental Journal. His short fiction won the Casey Research Short Story Prize. Lifeline took shape in John Rechy's Los Angeles writing workshop.Simmons is the author of two novels: Confessions of a Civil War Embalmer, narrated by a formerly enslaved woman who survives the war by becoming someone else, and Lifeline, about a California girl discovering that her family's history is a story someone built. Different centuries, same question. What identity costs, and who gets to decide it.Simmons is married to a Mexican American. Together, they have raised two daughters and live in Southern California.

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