What would you want to see again, in the last second of your life?
For Jim Robbins, the answer arrives on a dusty ridge in Western Australia, 1878: a lifetime rushing back at once. A boyhood in antebellum Arkansas, a love he wasn’t allowed to have, a war that took his innocence and gave him a cannon instead, and the iron rails he spent the rest of his life laying across two continents, trying to outrun his own grief.
Of Ashes and Dust follows Jim from a poor farmer’s cottage in 1846 Arkansas, through the Confederate lines at Nashville, to the golden spike at Promontory Summit, and finally to the outback railway camp where his story began. It’s a novel about the ledger every life keeps: of loves won and lost, wars survived and not survived, and debts that can only be paid in forgiveness.
Readers of Cold Mountain, News of the World and The Five People You Meet in Heaven will find a familiar warmth here, wrapped around a story that is entirely its own.