Cease Firing drops readers into the mud and blood of the Civil War's final years, following Confederate artilleryman Richard Cleave through the cataclysmic battles that sealed the South's fate. Based on actual memoirs including those of the author's cousin, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, the novel renders the conflict with startling intimacy: the screaming horses at Chancellorsville, the suffocating Wilderness, the trenches of Spotsylvania where men die in slow agony. Through Cleave's eyes, we witness Lee's army shrinking, hope curdling into grim endurance, and the terrible mathematics of a cause consuming its own defenders. Meanwhile, the Mississippi swells against Désirée Gaillard's home, a woman fighting floodwaters as her world collapses around her. Johnston wrote from within the veterans' memory, not from historical distance, and her prose carries the weight of stories told in veterans' homes. This is not romantic Lost Cause mythology but something more honest: a meditation on duty, camaraderie, and the particular sorrow of fighting for a cause you know is already dead.
