As brother turns against brother in the bloodbath of the Civil War, two young women sacrifice everything but their friendship, mending the fabric of a ravaged nation through the letters they exchange. Susanna Ashford is a Southerner, living on a plantation surrounded by battlefields. Cora Poole is a Northerner on an isolated Maine island, her beloved husband fighting the for the Confederacy. The two women communicate about art and literature, about loss an longing, about their future and the future of their country. About love. About being a woman in the nineteenth-century America. About the triumphant resilience of the human spirit.

Their voices and their stories are captured indomitable prose by an award-winning writer who "gives history life and breath." in Homeland, Barbara Hambly takes readers on an odyssey across a landscape treacherous with betrayal and hatred, painting a hypnotic and unique masterpiece of a friendship that rises above the most heart-wrenching era of American history.