DEMON OF UNREST

Demon of Unrest is a hair-raising, heart-sinking, edge-of-the-seat portrayal of the four months from Abraham Lincoln's election on Nov. 6, 1860, to the shelling of Fort Sumter, April 12-13, 1861, and the start of the Civil War - a period which has strong resonance in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

We all know that the attack on Fort Sumter started the Civil War, but Erik Larson manages to coax the reader into suspending that knowledge and feeling the heart-breaking tension as if they did not know the ending. This dread is all the more pronounced in light of today's political discord, which incredibly has led some benighted Americans to whisper of secession and civil war. Readers will know the importance of Sumter going in, but the conclusion comes as new, packed with "I didn't know that" moments and a potent emotional climax. Larson's narrative will braid together the many disparate threads of action that led to the attack on the fort and the start of the war. The book will also address an overlooked question - how on earth did a single fort in South Carolina, still under construction and manned by only 70 soldiers (instead of the requisite 650), become imbued with such symbolic power that it became the fulcrum for America's greatest tragedy? As Lincoln himself told an aide later in the war: "of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them." Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, most recently The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, which examines how Winston Churchill and his "Secret Circle" went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Larson's The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks for a feature film. He recently published an audio-original ghost story, No One Goes Alone, which has been optioned by Chernin Entertainment, in association with Netflix. His Thunderstruck has been optioned by Sony Pictures Television for a limited TV series. Larson lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.