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288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 12, 2016
Within the pages of Taylor Brown's FALLEN LAND he gives a graphically descriptive historic account of a violent and lawless time in an American war-ravished south.
Fine shocker of an ending.....Fine debut.
“They avoided the burned towns, mills, gin houses, planters’ factories when they could. They wanted to avoid the souls left wrecked in their wake. People desperate. Violent. But everywhere was destruction. Cotton, kind of the land, smoldered wherever they looked, in scorched fields and tumbled black barns and warehouses. It shrank as it burned, curling into itself like a spider might, the stacked bales collapsing into smoking heaps and mounds. Seeing all that, Callum knew it wasn’t just the will of the people that Sherman sought to break, like Ava said. It was the South’s ability to fund itself, to turn cotton into guns and cannons and shells, hardtack and haversacks, and men-at-arms.”
He did not want to close his eyes. The world had drawn down on him, the sky tattooed with death. Spiraling, spiraling. Everywhere a corpse.
He knew the falling land was telling him something, and the message yearned in his throat to be spoken. But he would not speak it. Could not.