The poets and their magical andat have protected the cities of the Khaiem against their rivals in Galt for generations. Otah, Khai of the Winter City of Machi, has tried for years to prepare his people for a future in which the andat can no longer be safely harnessed. But his warnings have been ignored, and now it's too late. A ruthless, charismatic Galtic general believes he has found a way to strip the andat of their power. If he is wrong, Galt will be destroyed. If he is right, the Khaiem will fall. Only one thing is certain: conflict is inevitable, and Otah and his old friend and enemy the disgraced poet, Maati, must fight a desperate battle to protect their cities from slaughter. These two men, bound together by shadow and betrayal, will bring the world to the edge of a cataclysm unlike anything either side had imagined. For if the cost of war is high, the price of peace may be unimaginable . . .

The story of Culpeper County, Virginia, is a unique one in Civil War history. Nestled in one of the South’s most strategically important locations, it was occupied by the Northern army, recaptured by the Confederacy, and finally ceded to the North. Told largely through diaries, papers, and correspondence of residents, common infantrymen, and such eminent personalities as Robert E. Lee, Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant, Clara Barton, and Stonewall Jackson, all of whom spent time in Culpeper, this story wonderfully captures both the intimacy and grandeur of war. Seasons of War moves from the primitive squalor of filled hospitals and the daily indignities of a soldier’s life to the editorials of a local newspaperman and the struggles of women and children left to the mercy of an occupying and hostile army. While famous Culpeper visitors like Lee and Whitman compose dispatches and lyric poetry, private citizens mourn their dead and defend their homes. Here are the very personal aspirations, losses, and sometimes gruesome banalities of an unforgettable American war. Sutherland’s account of the war is unlike any other. Both a military and a social history, it details the life of a single Confederate community without losing sight of the titanic struggle of a nation divided. It allows readers to join the councils of Lee and Grant while sharing the letters of young couples separated by war. We frolic with the fun-loving Jeb Stuart, experience the confused terror of men in battle, feel the anguish of civilians surrounded by contending armies, observe the tensions between neighbors with different loyalties, and sense the joy of liberated slaves. Written in a daring style that thrusts readers into the vortex of war, Seasons of War tells the story of a place and a nation. It is a tale by turns heroic and mean, hopeful and bleak, humorous and grave. It is a story of the American people—Northern and Southern, white and black, free and unfree—at the defining hour of their history.