The Light Infantry Ball

Hamilton Basso’s The Light Infantry Ball is a novel of the years of crisis that led to the fall of the plantation South, and of the more personal crisis of a well-born, highly-placed family caught up not only in the tensions of the time but in complexities of their own identities and relations to each other.

The story centers around a young planter, John Bottomley, whose life takes him, after a college education in the North, from the remote isolation of his family’s rice fields to the highest councils of government and then into uniform – a range and sweep that enable Basso to paint the broad, colorful panorama of a whole society.