About: Join Howard Means for the launch of his latest novel, Almost Home: A Novel of the Sultana and the Last Great Tragedy of the Civil War.

Almost Home begins and ends in water: the rivers that overflowed a now almost forgotten Confederate prison camp in Alabama and, at the other end, across a famine-ravaged South, the mighty Mississippi and the side-paddle steamer waiting to carry broken men back to homes they had left behind years earlier. Built around four invented soldiers from Indiana and a boy who adopts them and based on solid facts, Almost Home is ultimately a story of loyalty and love amidst all but impossible conditions.

“The writing is crisp and evocative, the characters indelible, the settings captured in high definition — grim stockades, phantasmagoric dreams, bustling towns, the flooding Mississippi. Almost Home is a literary and historical triumph.”

— Scott Shane, author of Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery's Borderland

Date & Time: Sunday, March 15, 2026. Doors will open at 1:30 PM, and the program begins at 2:00 PM.

Registration Information: This program is free to attend, but advance registration is encouraged to ensure available seating. Register online or by calling the Barns of Rose Hill Box Office at 540-955-2004 (hours). When our Box Office is closed, please leave a message.