“A literary and historical triumph”

The Civil War was over, a least on paper. Lee had surrendered his army to Grant and the Union two weeks earlier at Appomattox Courthouse. Prisoners long held in often unspeakable conditions both North and South were finally free to return to homes and loved ones left behind years earlier. But these were broken men, and they weren’t there yet.

ALMOST HOME has its origins in my own family history. My paternal great-grandfather was captured in his only battle of the war, at age 15; spent the remainder of the war in the Union prison at Rock Island, Illinois; and at the end walked back to an Alabama utterly devastated by the fighting there. I wanted to capture in fiction that sense of loss and returning, that intermingling of hope and despair that must have been commonplace in the America of spring 1865. When my research introduced me to the men held at the almost forgotten Confederate prison at Cahaba, Alabama, I knew I had found the perfect setting for launching my novel.

“Howard Means has endowed with visceral reality an unfamiliar slice of Civil War history, bringing to pulsing life a handful of Indiana men who fought for the Union and survived a brutal Confederate prison before beginning their unforgettable journey home. The writing is crisp and evocative, the characters indelible, the settings captured in high definition — grim stockades, phantasmagoric dreams, bustling towns, the flooding Mississippi. Almost Home is a literary and historical triumph.”

—Scott Shane, author of FLEE NORTH:
A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland