The Blood of Heaven is the prodigious first novel from twenty-six-year-old Kent Wascom. One of the most powerful and impressive debuts Grove/Atlantic has ever published, The Blood of Heaven tells the epic story of the American frontier in the early days of the nineteenth century. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young Unite d States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.