A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year and Winner of the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction Cass Wakefield left the bloodshed of the Civil War behind him twenty years ago and intends to live out the rest of his quiet days in his hometown in Mississippi. But when a childhood friend asks him to travel with her to Tennessee, he has no choice but to go along. Alison Sansing has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants to recover the bodies of her brother and father before she dies. Cass fought alongside Alison's loved ones in the disastrous Battle of Franklin and helped to bury them where they fell. Joined by two of his former comrades-in-arms, Cass guides Alison through the heart of the still-devastated South. Along the way, memories of the war emerge with overwhelming vividness, thrusting Cass back into the terror and exhilaration of the battlefield. At their journey's end, the group faces a painful reckoning between a past that refuses to die and a present still waiting to be born.
"The book's pace and detail are wrenching, and it is starkly devoid of romanticism. . . . The stories of ordinary men make for the novel's most provocative and deeply true sections. . . . The soldiers who survive the war are never done with it. This condition is not presented as the romantic clinging to a lost cause that has impeded honest assessment of those Americans who fought and lost a war, b
The Washington Post Book World
"Absorbing . . . This is a mature work of fiction by a gifted writer-affectingly eloquent and fearless of complexity and ambiguity."
Los Angeles Times
"Bahr knows how to turn a phrase and tug on the emotions, visceral feelings that we try to keep buried. His descriptions of the carnage of battlefields, of what bullets and bayonets can do to human flesh, will chill you to the bone. . . . His is a rare talent."
