Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, A Shout in the Ruins explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society. Spanning over one hundred years, the novel examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital. A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. Two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see. Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of interstate highway through Richmond, he travels south in an attempt to recover his true origins…. “Guided by a homing instinct for human truths, A Shout in the Ruins is a daring voyage into and out of the darkest era in American history” - Observer “A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence.” - Library Journal