Confederates is a 1979 novel by the Australian author Thomas Keneally which uses the American Civil War as its main subject matter.

[1] Confederates uses the United States Civil War as a setting for a more personal conflict between neighbors.

[2] After the novel's initial publication by Collins in the UK and Australia in 1979,[3] it was republished by Harper & Row in USA in 1980,[4] and later in various paperback editions.

Writing in The Canberra Times Mark Thomas noted: "Confederates evinces Keneally's fascination with the mechanics of fighting.

He examines rigorously how a battle works, what shapes a coward, how one man can shoot another...One of Keneally's problems may be uncertainty at the kind of story he is telling.