The Blood Of Heaven

"In Kent Wascom’s The Blood of Heaven, the aging slave trader Angel Woolsack confides his story of coming to manhood on the unruly American frontier in the first days of the 19th century. We travel the bayou-fringed lands stretching from Pensacola to New Orleans with this son of a firebrand preacher, encountering characters and events out of underremembered scraps of U.S. history: the Kemper Brothers’ rebellion, Aaron Burr’s seditious land grab, the birth of Florida. Slaves, plantation scions and dirty politicians throng this cracked-open world, as Wascom’s propulsive narrative takes us into the dark, fomenting soul of the South."