In the Shadow of Alabama

In the Shadow of Alabama is a novel by Judy Reene Singer, published in 2017. It moves between a present-day family that has stopped talking to itself and the Second World War service of the man at the centre of it.

Rachel Fleischer has good reasons not to be at her father's deathbed. It is foaling season, her horses are becoming restless and difficult, and her critical mother and grasping sister can manage Marty Fleisher's resistance without her. Her eighty-something horse manager Malachi, who has been more of a father to her than Marty ever was, persuades her that she will regret staying away. At the funeral a stranger hands her an odd gift and an apology, and Rachel finds herself drawn into her father's wartime experience: the friendships, trauma, scandal and betrayals that scarred the rest of his life and cast a shadow across the whole family.

The novel is a family story built on a war story, and its subject is how much of a parent a child can ever really know. The Alabama of the title is the place the family cannot leave behind, and the war is the thing they cannot discuss.