Flags on the Bayou

Summary

Set in Louisiana during the closing days of the Civil War, the novel follows an enslaved woman wrongly accused of murder and the abolitionist governess who flees alongside her through a landscape torn by violence. Burke shifts among several first person narrators to capture a society collapsing into chaos, blending crime, history, and his trademark lyrical evocation of the bayou country. The book reads as both a fugitive thriller and a meditation on conscience and survival.