Gob's Grief recounts the rives of Gob and Tomo Woodhull, fictional sons of Victoria Woodhull, the nineteenth-century protofeminist. In August 1863, eleven-year-old Tomo runs off to fight in the Civil War, during which he tragically takes a bullet in the eye and dies. Gob grows up in a profound state of grief, and by the time he's an adult studying to be a doctor in New York City, he has hatched an idea to build a machine that might bring Tomo -- indeed, all the war dead -- back to life. As Gob's obsessions deepen, we are taken from the battlefields at Chickamauga Creek to the society balls of New York; from innocent childhoods in Homer, Illinois, to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Along the way we are presented with an astonishing cast of real and imagined characters: Walt Whitman, ministering lovingly to the Civil War wounded; Mrs. Woodhull and her sister Tennessee; Gob's love, Maci Trufant; and even the evil Urfeist, a figure who seems to float sinisterly between the living and the dead.

Both convincing in its portrayal of the collective madness America went through after the carnage of the Civil War and yet otherworldly in its discussion of grief and longing, Chris Adrian's novel is at once an announcement of a major talent and an extraordinary achievement in literary art. In short, Gob's Grief is destined to be seen as an instant classic inAmerican fiction.