Coal Black Horse - Hardcover

" ƯAn¨ austere, elegiac fairy tale. Powerful and poetic." -Kirkus Reviews

" A powerful, redemptive narrative." - Publishers Weekly

" Robey's journey is a small-scale epic that will find a broad audience in... fans of Civil War historical fiction." - Library Journal

"The Civil War turns a boy into a man in Olmstead's latest novel??? [Olmstead] evinces a primordial universe: a time before gods, before mortality, a time in which war is as natural and inevitable as birdsong in the morning???Powerful and poetic."

" With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war's most horrific moments. . . gorgeous and moving passages"
-- Washington Post Book World

" Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead's magisterial sixth book, is as sensate as poetry and forbidding as any squall, steeped in detail but bound by few storytelling conventions. I wondered, as I read it, if it might be classified as myth....Coal Black Horse is a remarkable creation."
-- The Chicago Tribune
" A spare, classical quest story . . . With a horse like this, you just want to ride, and with descriptive powers such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one, with just enough lean prose to keep the mystery of an event both in time and out . . . and just the proper amount of sharp description to keep us bound to whatever piece of earth the particular moment of the story happens to be grounded in. . . . An effective mix of stark classic narrative and uncloying nostalgia."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"An exciting...coming-of-age novel...a grueling adventure."--"New York Times Book Review"

"It's the kind of novel that you will want to read once simply for the storytelling...Then you will want to read it again to let Olmstead's prose wash over you. It's as muscular, sturdy, well hewn, and wise as the coal-black horse himself.--"Boston Globe"

"Nothing I have ever read, in a willing career spent flipping the pages of war fiction, ever left a more visceral (and I mean that word precisely) impression of the horrors of war. The effect is staggering, saddening, a triumph of carnage-channeling."--"Paste" magazine

When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she sends her only child to find him and bring him home.

At fourteen, Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But it takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life.

Olmstead's epic tale joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.