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 United States' 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 60 years, this one yet unnamed: a grinding, horrifying series of hostilities and atrocities between two nations sharing the same continent and both calling themselves Americans.

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 imagined before. 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.