Fallen Land

October 26, 2015
In this evocative Civil War novel, 17-year-old Callum is riding with a Gray Ghost–like Confederate colonel and his band of partisan rangers when they happen across a pregnant girl, Ava, who is Callum’s age. After saving her from being raped, Callum is forced to go on the run with the girl, fleeing bounty hunters who mistakenly think that he was responsible for the Colonel (as he is known) being killed. The $5,000 bounty on Callum was posted by the Colonel himself in the event of his death, and everyone in his outfit is looking for a payday. Unable to shake the bounty hunters, Callum and Ava think that their best bet is Union-occupied Atlanta. Finding the city burned and with the bounty hunters hot on their trail, Callum and Ava make a desperate last ride east to reach the coast. Along the way, they come across victims of Sherman’s scorched-earth policy, as well as those who take advantage of the chaos caused by war. This is a Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Daniel Woodrell’s Woe to Live On, written in a vernacular that resurrects the era and fully brings alive Callum and Ava’s adventures on the road. At the center of the story is the couple’s growing love for each other, which powers the story to a suspenseful ending and a satisfying epilogue.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
Drawing from the shadows of America's epic tragedy, the Civil War, Brown's debut novel offers a tale of endurance and love in the face of adversity. Teenage Callum, fleeing an Irish workhouse and an American orphanage, rides as part of the Colonel's Confederate partisan troop. In Virginia's mountains, they fight for "no reason but hunger and the Colonel's orders," with "nothing but viciousness to keep them alive." During a raid, Callum saves Ava, age 17, from rape, but he's wounded by a fellow partisan gang member. Only later does he learn Ava was raped--by the Colonel. That spurs him to desert the gang and return to Ava's house. The Colonel pursues Callum, intent on reclaiming his magnificent horse, Reiver, which Callum stole. Reunited, Ava and Callum, weary of violence and death--a "land full of all these haunts, sorely displeased at the meager terms of their departure"--set out for Callum's distant relative on south Georgia's seacoast. Finding the Colonel dead at Ava's farm (and not knowing he was killed by a trio of outlaws, not by Callum), the gang wants revenge. Led by the Colonel's slave-hunter brother, Clayburn, they pursue. In an epic saga of endurance and sacrifice rendered in a voice wholly Southern in dialect, rhythm, and reference, the narrative follows the pair as they approach Atlanta aflame--"churning in great towers against the sky, monuments raised as if to the wrong kind of god"--and follow Sherman's March to the Sea. Ava and Callum, heroes to cheer for, live among other memorable characters, including Swinney, who once saved Callum from the shipwreck of a Cape Fear blockade runner; Lachlan the Alchemist, a near-blind moonshiner who provides temporary refuge; and a nameless old woman in a rocking chair, knitting amid fiery destruction, waiting for her only surviving son to return from war. Like McCarthy's Border Trilogy or Frazier's Cold Mountain, this is American literature at its best, full of art and beauty and the exploration of all that is good and bad in the human spirit.

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Starred review from November 1, 2015
Picture cindered trees wrapped with twisted railroad railsSherman's neckties burned-out remnantsof cities and farms, blackened ground for miles, and the empty stares of stone-faced women and girls. During the American Civil War, Union troops torched Georgia, from Atlanta to Savannah, to undermine the South's ability and will to continue fighting. This bleak, harrowing account of a young couple's journey in General Sherman's wake describes the fallen land with wrenching detail, in language both lyrical and heartbreaking. Callum, an orphan conscripted by a roving band of self-styled Yankee-killers, and Ava, a homeowner unluckily in their path, bond together in flight, yearning toward safety and a fresh beginning. Picaresque in styletracing the couple's wanderings from danger to devastationwith photographic precision and a stunning descriptive style reminiscent of a mournful ballad, this historical novel bleeds sorrow and regret. And the reader cannot look away or forget. Brown uses lovely language to describe the horrific, and dramatizes humanity's best and worst in wartime. Much like Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1997)in style, subject, and mood, but also as evocative of the nineteenth-century American landscape as Karen Fisher's A Sudden Country (2005), this is a masterpiece that deserves a full serving of accolades.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 15, 2015

The opening chapter of Brown's debut novel, also a story in his award-winning collection, In the Season of Blood and Gold, is a violent introduction to the lawless days at the close of the Civil War. Young Callum is part of a roving band of Confederates led by the Colonel, now stripped of his commission for stealing. Under the Colonel's misguided control, they wander the Southern countryside, raiding and killing. At one farmhouse, Callum finds a lone girl named Ava and tries to save her from the brutish Colonel. During the melee that follows, Callum is wounded and carried off unconscious. When he wakes up, he steals the Colonel's black stallion and rides back to rescue Ava. They outfit the horse and ride southward, always on the lookout for bands of foragers but hoping to reach the rumored safety of Atlanta and the plantation of Callum's distant cousins. Ava and Callum's frantic journey toward a new life is full of danger from the oncoming winter, Ava's pregnancy, and the enraged raiders out for revenge. VERDICT Brown's expressive language captures the harsh realities of the South at the time. A nail-biting journey from first page to last. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/15.]--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015

Montana Prize winner Brown has published short fiction in venues like the Baltimore Review but makes the leap to full-blown novelist with a work set in Georgia in the final years of the Civil War. Callum, a horse thief who emigrated from Ireland, decides to rescue Ava, who's lost her family to war and huddles in her house as soldiers scavenge nearby, and together they gallop away on a remarkable horse named Reiver. In-house enthusiasm.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015

The opening chapter of Brown's debut novel, also a story in his award-winning collection, In the Season of Blood and Gold, is a violent introduction to the lawless days at the close of the Civil War. Young Callum is part of a roving band of Confederates led by the Colonel, now stripped of his commission for stealing. Under the Colonel's misguided control, they wander the Southern countryside, raiding and killing. At one farmhouse, Callum finds a lone girl named Ava and tries to save her from the brutish Colonel. During the melee that follows, Callum is wounded and carried off unconscious. When he wakes up, he steals the Colonel's black stallion and rides back to rescue Ava. They outfit the horse and ride southward, always on the lookout for bands of foragers but hoping to reach the rumored safety of Atlanta and the plantation of Callum's distant cousins. Ava and Callum's frantic journey toward a new life is full of danger from the oncoming winter, Ava's pregnancy, and the enraged raiders out for revenge. VERDICT Brown's expressive language captures the harsh realities of the South at the time. A nail-biting journey from first page to last. [See Prepub Alert, 7/8/15.]--Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.