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by Kenneth Thomas (Author)
The bell broke before the country did.
In the spring of 1861, sixteen-year-old Eli Sutton lies about his age and rides away from rural Arkansas beside his closest friend, Silas Rowe. Eli understands little about governments, slavery, or the powerful men calling for sacrifice. He knows only that Silas is leaving, Anna is watching, and shame can look remarkably like courage when enough people are cheering.
They are told they will be home by Christmas.
Instead, Eli, Silas, and Thomas Miller are carried through four years of hunger, disease, battle, and retreat. They watch their company disappear one name at a time. They bury friends, carry the wounded, follow orders that no longer make sense, and witness the promises that took them from home turn slowly to ash.
By the winter of 1865, victory no longer matters.
Only home does.
But the army still claims them. The roads west are filled with patrols, flooded rivers, ruined farms, and desperate men shaped by a dying war. Somewhere beyond it all, their families are waiting without knowing whether the boys who left Arkansas are dead, captured, or still trying to find their way back.
To reach Yell County, the three men must cross a broken country carrying everything the war has taken from them.
And even if they survive the road, none of them knows whether home can receive the men they have become.
Ashes in the Wind is a full-scale American historical epic about friendship, class, slavery, responsibility, and the terrible cost paid by ordinary people when powerful men decide history requires blood.
This is not a story about generals moving armies across a map.
It is the war from the ground beneath a soldier's boots.
The empty place beside the fire.
The name missing from the roll.
The letter opened until the fold wears through.
And the long road home after almost everything worth returning to has been changed.
