Open Country: A Civil War Novel in Stories

2015 will bring to a close the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and timed to this momentous occasion, the publication of a striking debut novel by Jeff Richards, told in eighteen interwoven stories. Set during the Civil War and inspired by the true tales of Aden Price and Thomas Jermyn Walker Price, father and son veterans of the Civil War and Richards ancestors OPEN COUNTRY: A Civil War Novel in Stories - offers readers a lyrical and historically nuanced experience of our country s defining conflict. It is a tale of love and war, told to potent effect in the vernacular of the time, in which family and human relationships and the music of the time take center stage over the blood-soaked trenches and battlefields.

It would be tempting to discuss OPEN COUNTRY purely in terms of it being a Civil War novel. But to substitute the setting for the ideas and the emotional truths would not do justice to Jeff Richards book. That would be too easy. Instead, OPEN COUNTRY strips the circumstances of the war down to its most human level. It is about people trying to make sense of a world suddenly turned inside out. It is about having to make choices in which all decisions may be wrong. It is a place and time where loyalty and trust no longer follow convention. And, most of all, the novel is about the need to find hope when it s hard to believe hope can still exist. Yes, Jeff Richards OPEN COUNTRY may take place during the Civil War, but at its heart the novel shares the drama of human experience as though it is taking place right outside your door. It could be you. It could be me. --Adam Braver, MR. LINCOLN'S WARS

In the tradition of Isaac Babel s RED CAVALRY and Tim O Brien s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, Jeff Richards OPEN COUNTRY is a powerful, brutal, beautiful book of stories linked by war and the soldiers struggling to survive amidst its horrors. We follow Blues and Grays, wives and widows, worried mothers and grieving fathers, the doomed and the redeemed, the victorious and the condemned. This extraordinary book about the American Civil War offers both the concision of the well-made story and the sweep of the epic. A remarkable achievement. --Porter Shreve, THE END OF THE BOOK

Jeff Richards draws on the moments of intimate happenstance that so marked this peculiar war, in which whole histories shifted in quiet entanglements in thickets and creek beds, and a single line of a banjo tune might speak simultaneously of a loved one both arriving and departing. --Steve Amick, NOTHING BUT A SMILE

The Civil War was America s bitterest family quarrel, and Jeff Richards stories gracefully place the huge events of the war into human context. Anyone who loves the American story will treasure these stories as well. GARRETT EPPS, THE SHAD TREATMENT

With unflinching honesty, Jeff Richards leads us through the horror and fervor of the Civil War, giving us both Confederate and Yankee perspectives. We join ranks with young soldiers and their loved ones as they experience the stunned sorrow of loss, the loyalty of friendship, and the gentle grasp of love. Richards lulls yet agitates the heart as the war shapes each character. MELANIE S. HATTER, THE COLOR OF MY SOUL

The true value of a good novel, especially one written in another place and time, is whether or not it makes you believe you are there. As in great dramatic acting in film or theatre, do you empathize with the characters and are they authentic? Jeff Richards accomplishes that in his short, but epic novel, OPEN COUNTRY. Artfully written and musical in its cadence, I could hear the soundtrack as I read. Stark and tragic and as rustic as the hardtack and whiskey in its story, OPEN COUNTRY is a must read, lest we forget. JIMMY THACKERY, of Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers, WIDE OPEN (CD)