From the author of All Souls’ Rising which The Washington Post called “A serious historical novel that reads like a dream,” comes a powerful new novel about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most reviled, celebrated, and legendary, of Civil War generals.
With the same eloquence, dramatic energy, and grasp of history that marked his previous works, Madison Smartt Bell gives us a wholly new vantage point from which to view this complicated American figure. Considered a rogue by the upper ranks of the Confederate Army, who did not properly use his talents, Forrest was often relegated to small-scale operations.
In Devil's Dream, Bell brings to life an energetic, plainspoken man who does not tolerate weakness in himself or in those around him. We see Forrest on and off the battlefield, in less familiar but no less revealing moments of his life: courting the woman who would become his wife; battling a compulsion to gamble; overcoming his abhorrence of the army bureaucracy to rise to its highest ranks. We see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement, and in battle we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina.
As Devil's Dream moves back and forth in time, providing prismatic glimpses of Forrest, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a rough, fierce man with a life fill of contradictions.
Editorial Reviews
“Brave, accomplished and utterly compelling, seamed with passages of haunting, lyrical beauty.” –Kirkus
“From this retrospective view, hardscrabble Forrest emerges as a cog in a larger machine, a creature of a world he didn’t make, though complicit, to be sure, in its moral failures. North and South, ‘they’re in it right up to the neck with the rest of us,’ Forrest insists, speaking of slavery. ‘Make yore own self free,’ he tells his black son. But Madison Smartt Bell knows that such advice makes little sense to anyone wearing leg irons, that slavery didn’t end without unthinkable violence. And so, unlike Forrest, he whistles his devil’s dream to a different, more gripping, far more human tune.” –New York Times Book Review
“The "stuff" of which historical fiction is made, Forrest has found his novelist in Madison Smartt Bell. Born and raised in Nashville, Bell knows the sights, smells, sins and syntax of the Civil War South. His narrative, moving on and then off the battlefield, back and forth in time, is lush and lively, taut and tense.” –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Sparkling with jeweled descriptive moments, this volume absorbs Forrest and those around him into the crossroads of a violent, dangerous moment where history seems to compress, the dead awaken, and conflicts slip into a time zone that defies chronology.” –Baltimore City Paper
About the Author
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of fourteen previous works of fiction, including Soldier’s Joy and Anything Goes. He was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up collection bullets on the same fields where many of Forrest's battles were fought. He now lives in Baltimore.
