Historical Fiction on Digital Pensieve

Grant’s Grim Road to Richmond

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0500

Ralph Peters’ Hell or Richmond is the second novel in his Battle Hymn Cycle, following Cain at Gettysburg. It offers a compelling and often brutal account of Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign, told through the perspectives of the commanders and soldiers who endured it.

The novel covers the roughly thirty-day campaign that began in May 1864, moving from the tangled forests of the Wilderness through Spotsylvania Court House and the infamous Bloody Angle before reaching the disastrous Union assault at Cold Harbor. Rather than treating these battles as isolated events, Peters presents them as stages in one relentless struggle. Grant keeps moving south and attacking, while Robert E. Lee repeatedly tries to block his path and preserve the Army of Northern Virginia.

Cain at Gettysburg

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 21:40:00 +0000

Cain at Gettysburg by Ralph Peters steps onto well-traveled ground and, to its credit, finds a fresh path across it.

Anyone who has spent time with Civil War literature approaches another Gettysburg novel with hesitation. The battle has been retold in countless books and films, most famously in Michael Shaara’s “The Killer Angels”, and it’s easy to worry that a new entry will simply reshuffle familiar scenes.

The Complete midshipman Bolitho

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 03:12:00 +0000

Finished reading “The Complete Midshipman Bolitho” by Alexander Kent. This is the first book, in a series of nautical fiction novels set during the late 18th century in the Royal Navy. The central character in the series is Richard Bolitho. In researching about the book series, I discovered, that Alexander Kent was actually a pseudonym for Douglas Reeman.

This book is actually a compilation of the first 3 Bolitho books.