A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling,Cloudsplitteris narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, the last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown.Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter 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,Russell Bankshas given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time."An inordinately ambitious portrayal of the life and mission of abolitionist John Brown, from the veteran novelist whose previous fictional forays into American history include The New World (1978) and The Relation of My Imprisonment."  -Kirkus Reviews"...one senses that Banks might be writing, in disguise, about a more modern age, too. His central subject is, after all, a terrorist. For all his history-altering greatness, John Brown is intractable, pious, unswerving, and frighteningly possessed. It is Banks's attempts to get inside that mindset that make Cloudsplitter's story echo that much louder and longer, as it moves through its towering, unspoilt landscape."-Tom Cox, The Guardian