“Gorgeous, devastating.”
—The New York Times

“In the course of just two novels, Kevin Powers has already become one of the most original and exciting voices of his generation, and A Shout in the Ruins is a singular triumph of a book.”
—NPR

“An enthralling tale.”
—Oprah.com, O’s Top Books of Summer

“A Shout in the Ruins is confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent.”
—The Financial Times

“The book sizzles with authentic tragedy, realism and unreconciled memory…Powers has written a novel that demands we mourn as we learn.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Kevin Powers has written a harrowing, resonant civil war novel. A Shout in the Ruins again demonstrates the author’s nuanced understanding of conflict and its aftermath. Above all this troubling, stirring book is informed by Mr Powers’s deep understanding of war’s complexities, and of how people are broken and shaped by it.”
—The Economist

“A Shout in the Ruins — a novel bristling with carnage and tempered by mercy, born of combat and enriched by love — marks another triumph for Powers, who at 37 writes not only with intelligence but also with wisdom, and of whom further distinction can be expected.
—The Richmond Times-Dispatch

“With poetic and nimble language that brings to mind another student of literary violence, Cormac McCarthy, Powers, 37, creates a drama with deep roots in America’s struggles with race, sex and commerce.”
—The Dallas Morning News

“With A Shout in the Ruins, Powers — reared in Virginia and now settled in Austin — weaves a sense of history, introspection and soul-searching into his own confrontation with slavery’s hellish legacy. This book is a welcome addition to what is becoming, with increasing urgency, a national reawakening of the consequences of our violent racist roots.”
—The Texas Observer

“there is no mistaking the intensity of his vision and his ability to conjure up scenes…that stick in the mind. Powers…has written a novel that memorably illustrates not only the ways in which violence breeds further violence but also the unrelenting power of the past to shape the present.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)

“A Shout in the Ruins…confirms Powers as a significant talent.”
—Andrew Motion, The Guardian

“…reminiscent of Faulkner. An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“The Yellow Birds spoke powerfully to its moment, but A Shout in the Ruins illuminates an entire lost era…”
—Laird Hunt, Literary Review (UK)

“If, as I do, you hold your breath between publication of Cormac McCarthy novels for want of a tale of equal beauty and terror, relax and inhale. A Shout in the Ruins is certain to wrench the reader’s gut and heart, with ferocity and tenderness measured accordingly.”
—Roland Bisshop, Readings (Australia)

“lacerating and elegiac…possesses the same intimate, lyrical power as his haunting debut”
—BookPage

“Some passages in Powers’ second novel… unfold with a fable’s tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader’s consciousness…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

“A Shout in the Ruins brushes aside myth and romanticism for a clear-eyed look at America.”
—Shelf Awareness

“This is a powerful, provocative yet beautiful work that is sure to gather laurels come award season but is also, more importantly, one that will endure.  A spectacular achievement.”
—Bill Cusumano, Square Books (Oxford, MS)

“a beautiful, haunting story”
—Laurie Gillman, East City Bookshop (Washington, DC)

“Highly Recommending.”
—Jayne Guitart, Westwinds Bookshop (Duxbury, MA)

“A masterpiece. Powers has written a novel that includes all the ferocity, complexity, and racial violence of the American South, from its fall to its eventual rebirth.”
—Philipp Meyer

“Kevin Powers has seamlessly woven nineteenth and twentieth century lives to create a novel that resonates out of the past to address the most timely issues of America in our own century. The same striking language and contemplation of war and its aftermath that made The Yellow Birds such a lauded debut is on full display in A Shout in the Ruins. What an impressive novel.”
—Ron Rash

“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