AUBURN — The Auburn Public Library will host author Matthew Langdon Cost at 2 p.m. Thursday, April 7, for a reading and discussion of his historical novel “Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War: At Every Hazard.”

The novel traces Chamberlain’s evolution from “an arrogant, overbearing professor to unwitting and unlikely hero and leader of men.” After transforming from a college professor with no formal military training who turned the tide of the war at Gettysburg, Chamberlain was a genuine war hero. By war’s end, he was so respected that Ulysses S. Grant chose Chamberlain to accept the South’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Interwoven throughout the novel are subplots, including the coming of age of his young orphaned aide, a complicated marriage and lots of rousing battle scenes.

The story begins with a ferocious battle scene that orphans 14-year-old Emmett Collins. Following the last instructions of his father, Emmett shows up on Chamberlain’s doorstep in Brunswick, where he joins Chamberlain and the 20th Maine as they embark for war in the late summer of 1862. He grows from a boy into a man over the next three years as he accompanies Chamberlain on his rise through the ranks.

Cost graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. After graduation he wrote an unpublished historical novel about the Cuban Revolution of 1953-59. In 2007, Cost decided to write another historical fiction novel, choosing Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War as his topic.