The Fever Ward at Grosse Île
A Novel in Reverse

About this book:

When the last spade of earth falls on the final coffin at Grosse Île, the counting should be over. But for Dr. Robert Douglas, the arithmetic of 1847's great dying has only begun. In a narrative that runs backward through the ice-locked months of the quarantine season, *The Fever Ward at Grosse Île* rewinds from the silence of November to the chaos of May—unburying, chapter by chapter, the five thousand souls the river swallowed, the bureaucracy that buried them, and the fragile mercy that survived between.

Each chapter peels away a layer of the station's final winter: the priest whose Latin has worn thin, the laborer digging trenches in frozen clay, the child's pine box marked only *Unknown*. Moving upstream against the current of history, the novel reconstructs the summer the St. Lawrence became a morgue—when forty ships rode at anchor flying yellow flags, when the sheds held six thousand dying at once, and when Douglas's ledger became a testament against forgetting. The reverse structure doesn't just reveal what happened; it forces you to live the retreat from catastrophe, feeling the weight of every name lost to lime and haste.

Meticulously researched and written with the cold clarity of a November wind, this is historical fiction that refuses the comfort of distance. It asks what it means to witness, to record, and to stay human when the numbers stop making sense. For readers of *The Signature of All Things* and *Year of Wonders*, *The Fever Ward at Grosse Île* is a haunting, necessary act of reclamation—one that insists the dead had names, the living had choices, and the silence at the end was never empty.