The Man Who Lived Twice

Download or read book The Man Who Lived Twice written by David Taylor and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in nineteenth century America, The Man Who Lived Twice is a panoramic novel following Colonel George St Leger Grenfell, a courageous but deeply flawed Cornish cavalry officer who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. A hero to General Robert E Lee and a legend to the gullible hillbillies under his command, ‘Ole St Lege’ charged with the Light Brigade in the Crimea, hacked his way through the Opium War and defended the bullet-strewn barricades in the Indian Mutiny. Yet the mercenary that performed these feats of derring-do was a wanted criminal, a fraudster who bankrupted his father, risking his skin for what he considered to be a doomed cause in an unjust war. In his search for adventure, Grenfell travels the length and breadth of the continent, soaring precariously above enemy lines in a balloon and riding the rails to the Old West, meeting the characters who made, marred and mythologized American history: the business tycoons and social reformers as well as the back-shooting gunfighters and Lincoln conspirators. Along the way, he loses the woman he loves and is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. Brutalised by sadistic prison guards, he escapes to lead a far more successful life under an assumed name. Officially declared dead in 1869, Grenfell somehow survives to see in the twentieth century... The Man Who Lived Twice is the story of a personal search for redemption set against the emergence of the United States as a world power.