A Chain of Thunder

In May 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant's Union army crosses the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg and begins the campaign to seize the fortress city known as the "Gibraltar of the Confederacy." Jeff Shaara follows the officers and soldiers on both sides of the ensuing siege — Grant and his combative subordinate William T. Sherman, and Confederate commanders John Pemberton and Joseph Johnston — and, for the first time in a Shaara novel, a civilian: a young Vicksburg woman enduring the bombardment from within the besieged city.