Cloudsplitter

Narrated by John Brown's son, Owen, Cloudsplitter tells the story of the way in which an otherwise conventional middle-class Christian family man, a tanner, a failed wholesaler of wool, a small farmer and an inept land speculator and sometime pacifist became a deliberate, conscious martyr and political terrorist. aCloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, there is a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative full of intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of life and death and family love and strife that make the reader feel in astonishing ways exactly what it was like to be alive in that time. And in Owen and John Brown, especially, Banks has created two characters that will haunt the reader's imagination forever.aThe achievement of Cloudsplitter firmly places Russell Banks among the first rank of twentieth-century American authors.