"A Separate Country is a powerful evocation of New Orleans as it was in 1879, a book thick with history, rich in atmosphere. The characters walk the city's rough and tumble streets, witness the corruption of the Louisiana Lottery and the toll of the yellow fever epidemic, enact their very human love affairs, hide their secrets. To read it is to visit, for the length of its pages, an all-enveloping, passionately rendered past, beautiful and hallucinatory. 'This city is not for the fainthearted, ' Hicks writes."-- New Orleans Times Picayune
