Cloudsplitter: A Novel
by Russell Banks

Paperback: 768 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial;
1st Harper Perennial Edition
(February 1, 1999)
ISBN: 0060930861
8" x 5.4" x 1.8"

The cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual
photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown whose terrorist band murdered
proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in
1859 on what he considered direct orders from God,
helping spark the Civil War.

Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey from Brown's cabin facing the
great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an
abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various
perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the
South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas
and the Harpers Ferry revolt.

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter
is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous
and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched,
brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical
and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social
landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was
tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has
given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate
scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and
familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways
what it is like to be alive in that time.

Condition: VG+. Clean, tight and bright.