Inside Vicksburg, they are eating mule meat and dying in caves. Above them, a nation's fate hangs in the balance.
The Siege That Broke the West brings Grant's grinding campaign for the Mississippi River to shattering life - in this alternate timeline where the East has fallen but the West still burns. General Pemberton's starving garrison holds the bluffs. Grant's army tightens the ring. And relief never comes.
Told through the eyes of civilians in underground caves, surgeons operating without chloroform, soldiers mining toward each other through yellow clay, and commanders making decisions that will define the war west of the Appalachians, this is Civil War fiction that refuses to flinch from the reality of siege warfare - the boredom, the terror, the arithmetic of starvation that reduces great armies to counting biscuits.
While the Eastern theater spirals into diplomatic catastrophe, the Mississippi remains the one artery the Union can still sever. The Siege That Broke the West is the alternate history of how the West was not lost quietly - but with everything it had.
