In the world of this novel, said to be an inspiration for Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, the Confederacy has triumphed and become an imperialist nation. What is left of the United States has been drained of its resources and is trapped in a depression. Hodge, a young man living in a village in rural New York with his parents, decides to head to the city to escape his otherwise inevitable future of poverty and indentured servitude.



But the specter of war between the Confederacy and the other great global power, the German Union, haunts the entire region, and a nationalist terrorist group has other plans for Hodge. Before long, he is swept up in the politics of the day and becomes involved with a beautiful physicist who is working on a machine intended to change his fate—and the fate of the world.



Long before Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, Bring the Jubilee was the first novel to pose the question 'What if the South had won the Civil War?' A counterfactual classic, it was included in renowned science fiction editor David Pringle's list of the 100 Best Science Fiction Novels.