Cloud of Witnesses is a brilliant giant of a book, a novel of Tolstoyan scope and Dickensian exuberance, about the 19th Century in America. Set in various stages of the Civil War, and in the Texas of the Commanche Indian Wars, this storm of a novel portrays, with breathtaking beauty and unfailing grace, the terrible majesty and violence of the young country at War with itself, while managing to give us the full flavor of the time--all the loves, hopes, fears, dreams and trials of ordinary folk in the swirl of history. It is a great work of fictive art, from an author with a vast, wayfaring imagination.

Richard Bausch