Franklin Roosevelt is the assistant secretary of defense. Thomas Dewey is running for president with a blunt-speaking Missourian named Harry Truman at his side. Britain holds on to its desperate alliance with the USA’s worst enemy, while a holocaust unfolds in Texas. In Harry Turtledove’s compelling, disturbing, and extraordinarily vivid reshaping of American history, a war of secession has triggered a generation of madness. The tipping point has come at last.

The third war in sixty years, yet unnamed, is a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing a continent and both calling themselves America. At the dawn of 1944, the United States has beaten back a daredevil blitzkrieg from the Confederate States— and a terrible new genie is out of history’s bottle: a bomb that may destroy on a scale never before imagined. In Europe, the new weapon has shattered a stalemate between Germany, England, and Russia. When the trigger is pulled in America, nothing will be the same again.