Beneath Gray Skies — Hugh Ashton

(US trade-size edition) Beneath Gray Skies tells the story of David Slater, a young conscript in the Army of the Confederacy in the 1920s, as he learns power politics from the inside in the West's last slave-owning nation. He makes friends with a British agent, and strikes up an unlikely acquaintance with Hermann Goering, eventually finding himself rubbing shoulders with President Jefferson Davis III and Adolf Hitler on the first (and last) flight of the doomed Zeppelin airship Bismarck, carrying a mysterious cargo from Nazi Germany to the Confederate States of America. The action moves between the Confederacy and Washington DC as well as London and Berlin, examining the world of "might have been" had the American Civil War never been fought, and the Confederacy survived into the 20th century. Hugh Ashton lives in Kamakura, Japan, where he works as a writer and journalist. Beneath Gray Skies is his first published novel.