The Blood of Heaven

Wascom, Kent

ISBN 10: 0802121187 / ISBN 13: 9780802121189

Published by Grove Press, 2013

About this Item

Signed first. Late 18th century settlers in desolate west, with backgrounds highly unusual. Never read. Rare. This title is being offered not by a professional book seller, but rather by a life-long collector reducing his library in connection with estate planning. Please note that international orders are discouraged as shipping costs are uneconomical, and listed international shipping is likely to be much too low. In general, international shipping rates start around $40 USD, and errors are often committed in the ABE auto listing.

Seller Inventory # 2169

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Blood of Heaven
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802121187
• ISBN 13: 9780802121189
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

One of the most powerful and impressive debuts Grove/Atlantic has ever published, The Blood of Heaven is an epic novel about the American frontier in the early days of the nineteenth century. Its twenty-six-year-old author, Kent Wascom, was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, and this first novel shows the kind of talent rarely seen in any novelist, no matter their age.

The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.

The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.

About the Author

Kent Wascom was born in New Orleans in 1986, and spent his childhood in Louisiana and Pensacola, Florida. He attended Louisiana State University and received his MFA from Florida State University. In 2012, he won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, judged by Amy Hempel. Wascom lives in Tallahassee, Florida. The Blood of Heaven is his first novel.