G.S. Simmons - author

Author of:-

Confessions of a Civil War EmbalmerLifeline

Books:

CONFESSIONS OF A CIVIL WAR EMBALMER

“I reckon there ain’t nothing more useless in life than a dead body. You can’t slaughter it for meat. You can’t skin it for a hide.”Augustine Kane has always known the dead. Raised on a Virginia plantation where her mother served as healer, she learned early how to stitch wounds, ease pain, and sit with the dying. But when her first master dies and the plantation changes hands, the new master decides Augustine's body belongs to him. She makes sure it doesn't. Then she runs and vanishes into the Union lines disguised as August, a man.Because of her skill, August earns her way from contraband burial detail to medical steward to embalmer, a role that keeps her close to the dead and safely distant from scrutiny. When she saves Captain Robert T. Hall’s arm from the surgeon’s saw, she earns more than a place as his orderly: she earns his respect, his trust, and something far more dangerous. Hall is the first white man who has ever listened to her as if she matters. But love is a luxury a fugitive can’t afford.When Hall proposes a desperate escape - faking his death with a battlefield corpse - so they can disappear together, August finds herself holding three identities at once. A woman passing as a soldier, a Black fugitive bound to a white officer, and the architect of a deception built on a dead man’s face. Discovery is a death sentence.In a nation determined to erase her, August’s most radical act isn’t surviving the war. It’s deciding she deserves a life beyond it. And she's done asking permission.Currently on submission

LIFELINE

San Estere, California, 1996.Fourteen-year-old Juno Gold has never felt like she belongs. Not at school, not at home, and not even in her own family.Her mother, Lydia, has been in a coma since before Juno was born.Her father is a distant, ghostlike figure. Raised by image-conscious grandparents, Juno has learned to live with absence.When a stroke pushes the family into a court fight over her life support, Juno is quietly rooting for the machines to lose.Then a routine test reveals the impossible. Lydia is pregnant .The scandal cracks open every story Juno has ever been told. About her mother, her father, her heritage, even her own name. The only person willing to help her uncover these buried truths is Doña Lucrécia, the neighborhood curandera, who has spent five years waiting for Juno to ask the right questions.Blending quiet magic with psychological realism, LifeLine explores themes of identity, inheritance, and the cost of not knowing where, or who, you come from.Recently completed. Submitting soon.

About

G.S. Simmons was born in London, England, trained as a dentist, and has spent most of his life practicing in Southern California. Living proof that a person can hold more than one identity at a time, which turned out to be the subject of everything he writes.For eight years he wrote a column on American dentistry for the Royal College of Surgeons' Faculty Dental Journal. His short fiction won the Casey Research Short Story Prize. Lifeline took shape in John Rechy's Los Angeles writing workshop.Simmons is the author of two novels: Confessions of a Civil War Embalmer, narrated by a formerly enslaved woman who survives the war by becoming someone else, and Lifeline, about a California girl discovering that her family's history is a story someone built. Different centuries, same question. What identity costs, and who gets to decide it.Simmons is married to a Mexican American whose family came from Jalisco. Together, they have raised two daughters and live in Southern California.

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