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A Shout in the Ruins Kindle Edition

by Kevin Powers (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 386 ratings
Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction
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Set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the award-winning author of The Yellow Birds explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society.

Spanning over one hundred years, from the antebellum era to the 1980's, A Shout in the Ruins examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond, Virginia. When war arrives, the master of Beauvais, Anthony Levallios, foresees that dominion in a new America will be measured not in acres of tobacco under cultivation by his slaves, but in industry and capital.

A grievously wounded Confederate veteran loses his grip on a world he no longer understands, and his daughter finds herself married to Levallois, an arrangement that feels little better than imprisonment. And two people enslaved at Beauvais plantation, Nurse and Rawls, overcome impossible odds to be together, only to find that the promise of coming freedom may not be something they will live to see.

Seamlessly interwoven is the story of George Seldom, a man orphaned by the storm of the Civil War, looking back from the 1950s on the void where his childhood ought to have been. Watching the government destroy his neighborhood to build a stretch of interstate highway through Richmond, he travels south in an attempt to recover his true origins. With the help of a young woman named Lottie, he goes in search of the place he once called home, all the while reckoning with the more than 90 years he lived as witness to so much that changed during the 20th century, and so much that didn't.

As we then watch Lottie grapple with life's disappointments and joys in the 1980's, now in her own middle-age, the questions remain: How do we live in a world built on the suffering of others? And can love exist in a place where for 400 years violence has been the strongest form of intimacy? Written with the same emotional intensity, harrowing realism, and poetic precision that made The Yellow Birds one of the most celebrated novels of the past decade, A Shout in the Ruins cements Powers' place in the forefront of American letters and demands that we reckon with the moral weight of our troubling history.
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  1. Print length
    273 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Little, Brown and Company
  5. Publication date
    May 15, 2018
  6. File size
    1206 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of May 2018: Kevin Powers’ 2012 debut The Yellow Birds was a compact novel based loosely on his experiences as a soldier in Iraq, and it put him on a short list of talented new writers to watch. In this sophomore effort, A Shout in the Ruins, Powers has written another compact work, albeit one that introduces more characters and spans over 100 years. It opens during the Civil War, on the Beauvais Plantation outside of Richmond and examines the fates of those living on the plantation, white and black, through roughly a century. The south has a history built on violence and displacement, as does the country as a whole, and Powers is asking what that means for us, the people who have inherited that history. With its scope, themes, and careful attention to language, A Shout in the Ruins is a highly ambitious novel. You read the book as much to get lost in the words, in the voice and richness of description, as you do for the story; and while it may not hit every mark, it succeeds in its attempt to reach farther and higher than most. – Chris Schluep

Review

An elegiac tale of corruption and pain in the American South...Explores the memories and tragedies that can be passed down the family tree...A fine, relevant novel.

-- "BookPage"

With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present. An impressive novel.

-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"

Spiced with Flannery O'Connor-esque flavor, this rich brew of a novel evokes the checkered history of antebellum Virginia via run-down plantations and twilight marshes.

-- "O, The Oprah Magazine"

A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence.

-- "Library Journal"

A searing look at the ravages of war and how violence can shape a nation in ways that may never be fully recoverable...a novel that powerfully explores how slavery has infected this country and how history is never really confined to the past.

-- "NPR"

A Shout in the Ruins, as its title suggests, lays bare the tremendous suffering on which our country was founded and demands its acknowledgment. But Powers also offers love and grace in these pages, and a prayer for redemption.

-- "New York Times"

A harrowing and lyrical epic in miniature, Powers has written a novel excavated from another time but which speaks profoundly to this one.

-- "Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing"

Powers has given himself great freedom to explore and meditate on a wide swath of American history...A Shout in the Ruins is suitably unvarnished but not without moments of beauty or deep emotion...[and] brushes aside myth and romanticism for a clear-eyed look at American heritage.

-- "Shelf Awareness"

Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge, showing how love and kindness can take root in seemingly barren earth.

-- "Booklist"

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B075CTD426
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; Large Print edition (May 15, 2018)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 15, 2018
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1206 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 273 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0316556475
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 386 ratings

About the author

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Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers

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Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist. He was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
386 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Shel
5.0 out of 5 stars Original and profound
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2018
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The author's voice and humanistic perspective is unique. The prose is poetic without being self- conscious. The narrative jumps back and forth in time. The continuing thread is George. Episodes range from his early childhood during the Civil War to his 90's. The dialogue has the ring of truth. They all live in a society that has been shattered and bruised and each one of them is altered by their circumstances. They struggle to survive. The author has a unique talent for expressing violence that is both understated and moving. Lives move and collide and move on. A pervasive stoicism seems to be pandemic. This is a book unlike most. There is a Faulknerian and Jamesian pallet. It will stay with you. Sheldon Greene is a novelist, an executive in a wind energy company, and a lawyer with a background of high impact public interest litigation.
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C. Perez
4.0 out of 5 stars A searing portrayal of our violent birth as a nation
Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2024
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Farmer and muleteer Bob Reid and his sickly wife, Lucy, have a child in the summer of 1847. The girl, Emily, is a bit odd, with eyes the color of stormy clouds, and a cruel disposition towards Rawls, the family’s slave, scarcely four years older than her. Rawls has a tendency to run, reason why he has faced various degrees of punishments over his short life, but when he is eighteen years old, searching for the woman who will eventually become his wife, he meets the devil of a man who will become his next master— wealthy plantation-owner Anthony Levallois, their next door neighbor. Rawls’ fate, as well as his wife’s, Nurse, and the Reids’ will be tied to Levallois’s for the following five years.

A hundred years later, in 1956, a neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia is getting gutted to make way for the construction of a new highway. Knowing that he has little time left on this earth, nonagenarian George Seldom uses his life savings to buy train and bus tickets to visit the place where he was raised, a place that lives just vaguely in his memory, which he left behind seventy-five years earlier. With the help of Lottie Bride, a young woman he has just met, George Seldom searches for the place he once called home, and maybe a chance to acknowledge the sacrifice of those he owes his life to. Twenty-eight years later, in 1984, Lottie, now a middle-aged divorcée, occasionally remembers the old man she helped long ago. She is reluctant to commit to a new relationship, but that changes when she meets Billy Rivers, a Vietnam veteran who still bears the emotional scars of battle.

Running for 264 pages, A Shout in the Ruins is sometimes dense to the point where one may question where the story is going or if it will ever get there—especially between the 60-76% mark, thanks to the rather unorthodox storytelling style of alternating chapters focusing on characters who may be central or tangential to the overall themes. It pays off to stick to the story because the last 24% will make you think about it for days. There is a circular quality to the narrative that is the reason I questioned where it was going and what was the point of the plot. There are several, in fact. There’s the overarching theme of the violence that cemented the birth of our nation, with slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath, as focal points. Then there’s the mystery of George Seldom’s identity.

George Seldom was three years old when he was found by a gang of family-rebels led by Edgar Seldom, a Confederate soldier-turned deserter when his family was slaughtered and his home burned to the ground by neighbors looking to profit from his absence. Before meeting a violent end at the hands of a posse of armed locals, Edgar Seldom left young George in the care of a local healer. By piecing together who and what, the reader is eventually rewarded with the revelation of who was George Seldom, and the true identity of his parents. How he impacts the people he meets in adulthood drives part of the story as well.

A Shout in the Ruins is a searing portrayal of war and its aftermath—its emotional, physical and social consequences—, of the moral, social, and personal impacts of slavery, of how greed corrupts the soul, and of the power of love (expressed or implied) to redeem or condemn a man. Devastating in its finality, A Shout in the Ruins is a work of fierce and complex beauty. I have never read anything with such power to compel and pierce the heart. I’m tempted to forget that there were flaws that almost made me give up on it.
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bdoc
5.0 out of 5 stars WOW!!! GREAT HISTORICAL FICTION!!!!
Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2018
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The story grabbed me after 2 chapters and from then I spent a sleepless night to finish the book. Well written, developed characters, and a story that spans many years. George wants to know where he comes from, who is people are and so many whys. Intersecting throughout the story the elk handle knife is present. It is the only thing he has from his past. He isn't sure who it belonged to or how he has it. This is just one of the many threads that are woven through this epic read. You will intensely dislike some characters while you will love others. I imagine that post Civil War what happened in this book must have happened to so many.
6 people found this helpful
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whatsheread
3.0 out of 5 stars It becomes easy to imagine that their stories occurring hundreds of years ...
Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2018
As a story about the individuals on a plantation affected by the Civil War, A Shout in the Ruins is a decent novel. The individual stories are interesting, if not necessarily new, and the characters have enough development to become more than one-dimensional. It becomes easy to imagine that their stories occurring hundreds of years ago. Honestly, they probably have in some form or another.

As a novel trying to get you to contemplate life and love amidst a history of violence, A Shout in the Ruins is lacking. There is an absence of continuity between the various time periods that is disruptive. The interrupted flow of the story diminishes any lessons one might obtain from the characters' insights. In addition, there is a heavy-handedness to these lessons which is somewhat repellent. You want these personal insights to be a natural part of the novel. Instead, Mr. Powers all but force feeds them to you. In doing so, he loses you as a reader, and you end up skimming exactly those points he so desperately wants you to read.

You are left wondering whether there is anything original in A Shout in the Ruins worth evaluating. After all, there are numerous stories about slaves and their plantation owners already in existence. There is no need for yet one more novel, written by a white man, about this time period. Mr. Powers offers nothing new in the way of insight or historical fact, and his lessons about love and violence and the Civil War era plantation life feel wrong given his ethnicity.

The only reason I stayed with the story is that I grew to like the characters, particularly Nurse, Rawls, and George. I wanted to see how they fared in the end, hoping it was not going to end like so many other slavery/black man stories. I remained pleasantly surprised by their stories and the details within them. Thus, as a novel of historical fiction, A Shout in the Ruins is decent It is well-written with developed characters that play on your sympathies and keep your interest. It is only when the novel attempts to become literary fiction where it loses you. Its attempts to provide life lessons the author should not be providing leave you more confused than anything, and the obviousness of these lessons makes you resent and skip them, further compounding the confusion. It is a shame actually that Mr. Powers chose not to stick with straight historical fiction. The novel would be much stronger had he done so.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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ISABELLE
1.0 out of 5 stars Livre rédiger en Anglais
Reviewed in France on March 27, 2019
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Très déçu car le livre est rédiger en Anglais ce qui n'est pas clairement visible dans le descriptif du produit il faut vraiment chercher pour le voir donc impossible pour moi de le lire et retour du produit à mes frais en Angleterre.
Pour la prochaine fois je réfléchirais en deux fois avant de commander chez amazone.
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Random Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars a shout in the ruins
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 24, 2018
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
4-5 stars
Enjoyed this one. Would read more by this author. Recommended.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 26, 2018
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A beautiful, haunting book, covering the intertwining lives of the characters over a century, from the time of the Civil War. It is a story of the defeated South, the last throws of slavery, the corruption of the nobility and the nobility of the oppressed and the simple minded.
The writing is gorgeous, as can be expected of a poet. I particularly enjoyed the construction of the narrative as it swung between the periods, gradually fleshing out the back stories, while a small knife links the tapestry of events. Read it.
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Cheryl
5.0 out of 5 stars Entrancing read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2021
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A novel of great observational depth and historical richness. A memorable work of literature and philosophy. For anyone interested in a good story and an insight into the American psyche.
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JuliaC
5.0 out of 5 stars A rare treat
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 7, 2018
Vine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )
After being so impressed with Kevin Powers' debut novel a few years ago, I was very pleased to get the chance to review his latest one. The previous book, 'Yellow Birds' was a raw and brilliant portrayal of the brutality of war, as told from the point of view of US soldiers in Iraq. And I felt that some of the brilliance of that book would not have been possible without the author's own personal experience of that war.

But this new novel is a completely different sort of book. It deals with violence, love and desperation, but across different time periods and between people connected by sometimes the thinnest of threads. Set in America, one of the most powerful strands is the story of what happens to black slaves in the southern confederate state of Virginia after the Civil War is over. The brutality is sometimes shocking but the strength of will of some of the characters to survive these horrors is stirringly recounted. I enjoyed each different part of the book, wound as they are skilfully together so that each story grabs you and moves you.

Kevin Powers is a very talented author, whose gift for storytelling to reveal the very best and worst of humanity is stunning. And this book proves that he does not need to rely on autobiographical material to produce work of such a high quality. I am confident that this book will be as critically acclaimed and well received as his first. A rare treat
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