One of the Amazon Editors' Best Books of 2018
Following his hugely celebrated debut novel, The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers returns to the battlefield and its aftermath, this time in his native Virginia, just before and during the Civil War and ninety years later. The novel pinpoints with unerring emotional depth the nature of random violence, the necessity of love and compassion, and the fragility and preciousness of life. It will endure as a stunning novel about what we leave behind, what a life is worth, what is said and unsaid, and the fact that ultimately what will survive of us is love.
'An American Civil War epic [which] confirms Powers as a significant talent.' Observer
'Gorgeous and devastating' New York Times
'Achingly relevant.' Grazia
Review
An American Civil War epic [which] confirms Powers as a significant talent. (Andrew Motion Observer)
'Gorgeous, devastating... As in his first novel, The Yellow Birds, Powers details these inhumane acts with elegance, restraint and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. His spare, meticulous sentences lend a perverse beauty to even the most brutal passages of the novel and give immediacy and emotional heft to the ordeals of its characters... lays bare the tremendous suffering on which our country was founded and demands its acknowledgment. But Powers also offers love and grace in these pages, and a prayer for redemption. (New York Times)
A work of historical fiction that is as unflinching an examination of our capacity for cruelty and violence as his debut. . . Powers packs much into a relatively short work. . . there is no mistaking the intensity of his vision and his ability to conjure up scenes that stick in the mind. . . A novel that memorably illustrates not only the ways in which violence breeds further violence but also the unrelenting power of the past to shape the present. (Sunday Times)
Powers's prose is lyrical. . . his evocation of slavery-era Richmond is powerfully achieved. (Siobhan Murphy The Times)
The writing is beautiful and powerful. A Shout in the Ruins is confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent. (FT)
Ranging across time and following several characters whose lives become entangled by chance, family connection and conflict, Powers returns here - with similar, admirable compression - to themes he took up in his celebrated debut, The Yellow Birds . . . A Shout in the Ruins illuminates an entire lost era. (Laird Hunt Literary Review)
A harrowing and lyrical epic in miniature, Powers has written a novel excavated from another time, but which speaks profoundly to this one. (Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing)
A daring voyage into and out of the darkest era in American history. (Observer)
One of the chief rewards of this novel is that it speaks very much to the present through the generational interplay of its characters . . . It is told subtly and with great empathy: Powers once again demonstrates the precise eye for imagery and detail that is becoming the hallmark of his work. (Elliot Ackerman TLS)
This troubling, stirring book is informed by Mr Powers's deep understanding of war's complexities, and of how people are broken and shaped by it. (The Economist)
