A Shout in the Ruins (Broché)

Acts of violence echo down the halls of a ruined plantation house in deepest Virginia. A house whose inhabitants exist only as ghosts whose stories orbit its now silent fields : a wounded Confederate soldier lost in a world he no longer understands ; a daughter married off to the cruel plantation master ; two slaves who find that freedom may not be something they will ever live to see. And a man, a century later.
Free, but asking the same questions : how do we live in a world built on the suffering of others ? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy ? Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made The Yellow Birds one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A Shout in the Ruins cements Powers' place as one of the most important novelists of our time.