As the novel follows Grant to West Point and into the Mexican War, through grinding poverty and failure that would break another man, and then to Vicksburg, Appomattox, and the White House, Grant wrestles with not only the searing issues of his time, but the questions of fate and destiny that lie at the heart of any great novel.

In Grant Speaks, Ev Ehrlich takes history apart and reassembles it, superimposing his outrageous premise over meticulously chronicled events. Here is Grant, his mad blood brother Sherman, and all the other great figures of Grant's time, from Lincoln ("ugly enough to tax a mother's love") to Lee ("that sanctimonious momma's boy... I knew I could take him") to Custer ("a little, foppish, yellow dog... he got what was coming to him") to Scott, McClellan, Halleck, Garfield, and a host of others, each shown no mercy.