This immensely powerful story follows the extraordinary life of William Bartholomew, a maimed veteran of the Civil War, as he returns from the battlefields to New York City, bent on reversing his fortunes. It is there he meets Jessie, a Creole prostitute who engages him in a venture that has its origins in the complexities and despair of the conflict he has left behind.
He also befriends a deputy inspector of Customs named Herman Melville who, largely forgotten as a writer, is condemned to live in the wake of his vanished literary success and in the turmoil of his fractured family.
A gripping portrait of a nation trying to heal from the ravages of war - and of one man's attempt to recapture a taste for life through the surging currents of his own emotions, ambitions, and shattered conscience.
A National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pen/Faulkner Award nominee
