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Erik Larson, author of The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Erik Larson offers a gripping account of the chaotic months between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Sumter --- a period marked by tragic errors and miscommunications, inflamed egos and craven ambitions, personal tragedies and betrayals. Lincoln himself wrote that the trials of these five months were “so great that, could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

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Week of March 9, 2026

Paperback releases for the week of March 9th include THE DEMON OF UNREST, in which Erik Larson brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War --- a simmering crisis that finally tore a deeply divided nation in two; Nicole Cuffy's O SINNERS!, a searing novel about a grieving young man drawn into the orbit of a charismatic cult leader who forces him to reconsider why people give up control --- and what it takes, ultimately, to find one’s place in the world; FLOAT UP, SING DOWN, a masterful story collection from Laird Hunt that captures one summer's day in the Indiana community where ZORRIE bloomed; and THE MAN NOBODY KILLED by Elon Green, the first comprehensive book about Michael Stewart, the young Black artist and model who was the victim of a fatal assault by police in 1983.

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