A sweeping literary epic about a doomed romance set against the backdrop of the Civil War, from one of the most interesting historical novelists at work today

Sarah Golden is the unhappy wife of a wealthy Southern merchant. She has resigned herself to a life of boredom: she endures her marriage, the tedious talk of high society, and even the company of her silent daughter, whom she can't bring herself to be interested in. But something secret creeps into her heart the moment she sets eyes on him. The tall, severely handsome man in the Union rowboat, headed toward Fort Sumter in the dead of night. It's Charleston, December 1860, on the precipice of war.

So begins a passionate liaison between the beautiful southern malcontent and Walker Stringfellow, a married abolitionist lawyer from Cambridge. Yearning for each other yet kept apart, it would be the couple's ruin if anyone found out-especially Stringfellow's ward, the charismatic Cation Dryer, who escaped from slavery to the north as a boy. Brilliant but mercurial, Cation harbors no illusion that America's racial divide will ever be reparable. He spares no one his judgment, least of all the guardian whose thumb he resents living under.

The Late Unpleasantness is a panoramic study of a nation at war over its sins, with a cast of characters both fictional and real, including the corrupt but effective Union general, Benjamin Butler; the flamboyant South Carolina novelist Susan Petigru King; and the Confederacy's Jewish secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin. It roams from newspaper offices to battlefields; southern ballrooms to prisoner-of-war camps; gaslit theatres to hospital wards. As the whirlwind of war scatters the characters across Charleston, Washington, New Orleans, and New York-and as desire turns to madness-fortunes and allegiances will shift, and readers will never be sure how fully or how long they should give their hearts to any of them.