Time of Drums — John Ehle

Dust jacket notes:"Few writers have the ability to emblazon and project an authentic past the way John Ehle has done, and few have his narrative skill. In this new novel he has presented the American Civil War in such a way that it shows the shape of time to come; his characters go on living after the book is closed, and its action continues after its final events. The novel, touching, honest, brutal, funny, sad and sometimes glorious, recounts the fall of an era as seen through the eyes of Owen Wright, a colonel in his thirties, a soldier in the Army of the Confederacy. This is his personal accounting for his feelings and actions during six months of his life: time spent in winter camp in 1862, time spent at home with his family - where he falls in love again, this time with a widow-girl of nineteen whom he fears he cannot have and cannot forget - and Gettysburg leading his regiment of mountain soldiers. For its authentic portrayal of the Civil War and its compassionate portrayal of love and family, this novel is a powerful, living achievement. Time of Drums is one of four novels John Ehle has written about the Wright and King families. The Land Breakers tells the story of the first settlers in the North Carolina mountains; Time of Drums deals with the period of the Civil War; The Road is the story of the postwar efforts to open up the mountain country; and Lion on the Hearth is about a prosperous mountain family in the depression of the 1930s. John Ehle (pronounced EE-lee), who was born in Asheville and owns a cabin that looks out on the highest peaks in eastern America, writes: 'It has been particularly rewarding for me to write about mountain people, for they seem to have more humor in them than do most others, and more pride. Sometimes I have seen them standing in a field or alongside a road looking off at the horizon, as if listening to voices indistinct, to some far, forgotten reminders of an unremembered country, of another time, of an ancestry obscure...."