John Sayles is "one of the country's best independent filmmakers," according to a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World. An Academy Award-nominated writer and director of such classic films as The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Matewan, Eight Men Out, and Lone Star, Sayles has also edited screenplays for dozens of major motion pictures, including Apollo 13, Men of War, and Mimic. He won the Writer's Guild of America's Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Lifetime Achievement, and his novel Union Dues was nominated for the National Book and National Book Critics Circle awards. Set during the Philippine-American war at the turn of the century, Sayles's latest novel explores the history of that era through the individual voices of Filipino rebels, African American military men, and gold-seeking miners, among others.