Chaucer’s Bookstore will host historian and New York Times bestselling author Scott Ellsworth for a book talk and signing of his latest title “Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America,” 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 26 at 3321 State St., Santa Barbara.

From the author of “The Ground Breaking,” longlisted for the National Book Award, comes Ellsworth’s saga of the last year of the Civil War, and a revealing new account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

“Told with a page-turning pace, New York Times bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years,” Chaucer’s said.

Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain, “Midnight on the Potomac” is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal citizens of the North.

Taking us behind the scenes in the White House, along the battlefronts in Virginia, and into the conspiracies of spies and secret agents, Lincoln walks these pages, as do Grant and Sherman, Chaucer’s said. But so do common soldiers, runaway slaves, and an unknown but intrepid female war correspondent named Lois Adams.

“Midnight on the Potomac” also shatters some long-held myths.

For more than a century and a half, the Lincoln assassination has been portrayed as the sole brainchild of a disgruntled, pro-South actor. But based on both obscure contemporary accounts and decades of long-ignored scholarship, Ellsworth reveals that for nearly one year before the tragic events at Ford’s Theatre, John Wilkes Booth had been working closely with agents of the Confederate Secret Service. And the real Booth is far from the one we’ve long been presented with.

“Midnight on the Potomac” tells of the Confederate attempt to burn down New York City; how Lincoln almost lost the presidency; about the Rebel general who nearly captured Washington; and how thousands of enslaved African Americans freed themselves — and helped secure their nation’s survival.

Described by one reviewer as “a historian with the soul of a poet, Ellsworth is the author of “The Secret Game,” winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, and “The Ground Breaking,” his critically acclaimed account of the Tulsa race massacre.