Of Ashes and Dust

HE SURVIVED THE WAR. HE BUILT A RAILROAD. NOW HE HAS ONE BREATH LEFT TO FORGIVE.

Jim Robbins is the son of a poor Arkansas farmhand who falls hopelessly in love with the one girl he's not allowed to have — the plantation owner's daughter, Angelina “Gina” Barnes. Then the Civil War tears the South apart, and Jim goes to fight it as a Confederate gunner, leaving Gina, and the life he'd hoped to build, behind him. He comes home to find Gina married to someone else and the world he knew burned to ash.

With nothing left but iron and ambition, Jim throws himself into building America's first transcontinental railroad — and later, a second one, half a world away in the Australian outback. Along the way he gains a brother in a former Union scout, a mentor who won't let him forget his roots, and a second chance at love that is stolen from him by men who valued her life less than his own.

Twenty years after that first, forbidden love, an accident on a lonely Australian ridge gives Jim Robbins one last, impossible gift: the chance to live it all again, in the space between one heartbeat and the next — and the news that the woman he never stopped loving is, at this very moment, only hours away.

A sweeping saga that moves from the antebellum South to the Civil War to the birth of the modern railroad, OF ASHES AND DUST asks the question every life eventually must answer: Can a man who has already been through Hell still find his way to Heaven?

Perfect for readers of Cold Mountain, News of the World, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven.