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Hodgins "Hodge" Backmaker, a bumbling but curious and fiercely intelligent bookworm who has never felt at home with his family, left his home in rural Virginia in 1938. It's been over 70 years since the North lost the War for Southron Independence, in which his grandpa Hodgins fought bravely, but the repercussions of the impact of the loss still feels fresh after all these years. While the Confederacy blossoms with fine schooling, industrious manufacturing and a prosperous economy, the United States suffers from the lack of progress and poverty that has pervaded a lost union. When Hodge gets to the big city of New York, he finds room and board with a curiously pedantic and contradictory bookstore owner named Tyss who he discovers is working covertly for the Great Army, an underground movement in the northern states looking to take back the nation, through devious means. Eventually Hodge's fortunes lead him to a communal society of intellectuals called Haggershaven where he prospers as