For over two decades, I have been planning and working on a novel about the American Civil War, specifically about the war's most terrible series of battles--the 40-day Overland Campaign of May and June 1864 and the nine-month siege of PETERSBURG that followed it.  Countless novels have been written about the Civil War, and a few have touched on parts of this story, but no one, as far as I know, has ever written a novel about the whole thing.

I finished it recently and had submitted a query to a publisher, but was frantic to get it out in time for the sesquicentennial of the events it depicts next spring and summer.  So I published it via Amazon Create Space.  It is available in paperback in the US, the UK, and Europe, and will soon be available in Kindle format.

Here is the UK link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forty-Days-Nine-Months-Pennsylvania/dp/1493695827/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1387159903&sr=8-1&keywords=Forty+days+and+nine+months

The description:

In the early days of the Civil War, a group of very different young men gathered in Philadelphia to become members of the 95th Pennsylvania Volunteers--one of those very special units of fighting men called the Zouaves. Twenty five members of that group recognized that they shared a special bond, and called themselves the Original Twenty Five. Now it is May of 1864. The war that would be over soon is now in its fourth year, and the Original Twenty Five is now down to twelve. They are moving South yet again, under a new commander with a new strategy for finally ending this endless war. But to end the war, these surviving friends must endure a forty-day orgy of slaughter that History's greatest butchers could not have conceived--and nine endless months of a new type of warfare that carries with it mind-numbing boredom, the constant threat of sudden death, their all-consuming fears and dreams--and the madness growing within them all . . . An epic in the oldest, truest sense of the word, this is an unflinching look at outward butchery and inward suffering--and the hard-won compassion that sustains, even in defeat.