This inconsistent follow-up to Powers's PEN/Hemingway Award-winning The Yellow Birds traces the destructive legacy of slavery from the 19th century to the recent past. The first of the novel's two main story lines centers on the Beauvais Plantation, contrasting the loveless marriage of its white owners, the young Emily Reid and the volatile Antony Levallois, with the profound connection between two of their slaves, Rawls and Nurse. The affecting second story line, set in 1950s Richmond, Va., concerns 90-year-old George Seldom, the child born of Levallois raping Nurse. Powers strikes a fine balance between the two narratives; less successful, though, are the tangential investigations into the lives of a union officer overseeing Reconstruction, Tom Fitzgerald, and a diner waitress whom George befriends, Lottie Moore. These sections feel like unnecessary padding that softens the impact of the novel as a whole. Emily, Rawls, and Nurse eventually have their violent confrontation with Levallois and make their respective flights from Beauvais, but the resolutions that the book then offers are either too coincidental, cheaply tragic, or vague. The reader is left with a shout that enervates more than it inspires. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

MIDWAY THROUGH KEVIN POWERS'S gorgeous, devastating second novel, one of the protagonists reflects on what he believes to be "the truth at the heart of every story, that violence is an original form of intimacy, and always has been, and will remain so forever." It is certainly the truth at the heart of "A Shout in the Ruins," a multigenerational Southern tale that moves from the antebellum era through the 1980s, with the dark thread of slavery winding throughout, a noose around the throat of every character, black or white. The novel opens in Virginia in 1870, four years after a mysterious arson at Beauvais Plantation, committed by Emily Reid Levallois, a white woman who is presumed dead by the authorities but remains very much alive in the minds of the locals. What follows is a story of the intertwined fates of Emily, the other inhabitants of Beauvais, and the inheritors of their crimes and mercies: Emily's father, Bob Reid, a landowner and mule skinner who returns home from the Civil War crippled and missing an arm only to find he has also been robbed of his land; Antony Levallois, the ruthless, amoral planter who dispossesses him, and with whom Emily is forced into a loveless marriage; their slaves Rawls and Nurse, whose hatred of the white masters who have abused and sundered them burns as fiercely as their love for each other; and George Seldom, a black man in his 90s born and orphaned during the Civil War, who returns to his childhood home in 1956 in search of his origins. They and the characters they encounter on their individual journeys mark one another indelibly. They do it physically and often casually - chopping off toes as punishment for running, sawing off legs gone gangrenous, raping and beating, shooting and stabbing - but the deeper and more agonizing wounds they deal one another, Powers makes clear, are the psychic ones. The flesh suffers the lash more easily than the spirit. The loss of a limb pales next to the shame of feeling like a monstrosity and a failure. Dispossession of one's property is a trifling violation compared with theft of one's personhood. 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. None of them is untouched by violence, and the repercussions ricochet among them and down through the generations. The story's message is unambiguous: The cruelty we inflict on others harms not just our victims, but also ourselves, because we are all more intimately interconnected than we realize. It's a message that resonates with particular force at this rancorous, divided moment in America's story, when so many of us are in willful denial of the grim legacies of the past blighting our present. "A Shout in the Ruins," as its title suggests, 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 - if we can see, like the disillusioned mother through her newborn child, the sun again; if we can believe that "though the conditions of the world may be very much as permanent and endless as the land on which we work, even those conditions can be improved with every season if worked rightly." Amen to that. Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels "Mudbound" and "When She Wokel

Some passages in Powers' second novel, following his awarding-winning The Yellow Birds (2012), unfold with a fable's tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader's consciousness. In his depiction of America's heritage of racial trauma, he takes the long view, moving between Civil War-era Virginia and 120-plus years later. Mystery surrounds the fate of Emily Reid Levallois, mistress of the Beauvais Plantation, near Richmond, after a devastating 1866 fire. Scenes detail her unhappy circumstances: due to terrible battlefield injuries, her father is unable to prevent his covetous, cruel neighbor, Antony Levallois, from wedding Emily. An enslaved couple, Rawls and Nurse, are brought together and torn apart. In a linked tale beginning in 1956, George Seldom, a ninetysomething African American, travels through the segregated South to his onetime North Carolina home while pondering the unknown circumstances that ensured his childhood survival. Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge, showing how love and kindness can take root in seemingly barren earth.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2018 Booklist

Spanning more than 120 years, Powers' (Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, 2014, etc.) new novel is an exploration of the ongoing effects of the Civil War.Alternating chapters between the Civil War era and the mid-20th century, the novel opens with the mysterious disappearance, and rumored death, of Emily Reid Levallois in the late 1860s and then moves back to look over her life beginning with her birth. Her father, Bob, was a mule skinner in Chesterfield County outside of Richmond, Virginia, whose work paid for a "modest but respectable" house and two slaves, Aurelia and her son, Rawls. The Reids live next to the Beauvais Plantation, owned by the coldly cruel Antony Levallois, one of those planters who "dreamed their farms were kingdoms." After Rawls tries to run away, looking for a fellow slave named Nurse he's met and fallen in love with, Levallois buys him, Aurelia, and a Percheron horse for about $1,400, demonstrating in a deft stroke the cruel position of slaves as mere animals to their owners. Levallois was happy with his purchase: "Accounting for inflation, he damn near got the horse for free." Meanwhile, in a story set in the 1950s, we meet George Seldom, now in his 90s and on a quest to seek out some of the places associated with his childhood. While at first the two narratives seem to have little relationship to each other, as the novel progresses we learn of the intricate connections between characters over generations. Back amid the chaos of the Civil War, Bob Reid joins the Confederate army and is badly wounded, his life coming even further apart when he learns that Emily has taken shelter at Beauvais and that Levallois has plans to marry her. With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present.An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Powers's debut novel, The Yellow Birds, a National Book Award finalist, offered a poignant rumination on America's reverence for patriotism but simultaneous amnesia regarding the lives of deployed soldiers in a story drawn from the author's own experience as an Iraq War veteran. This second novel, set in Powers's hometown of Richmond, VA, probes the grip of traumatic memory in the aftermath of the Civil War. While former Confederate soldiers roam the backdrop of this work with conflicting convictions dictating their actions in a newly liberated South, former slaves are navigating the concept of freedom within the lingering structures of oppression. Meanwhile, a former plantation owner tries to harness Reconstruction to his advantage only to discover that redemption will not be his fate. Returning to this land, almost 100 years later, a man born shortly after the end of the war struggles to claim his memories of home. VERDICT A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence. [See Prepub Alert, 11/6/17.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.