I’ve never read a story like this. A young boy withstands excruciating setbacks and vicious bigotry in seventeenth-century Virginia simply because of what he looks like, yet never feels an ounce of self-pity or explodes in righteous anger.
Rather, to sustain himself he holds onto the memory of his mother’s love. What an extraordinary portrayal, gripping and original, one that makes me examine my own life.
Meet Tony: the first Indian to set foot on American soil.
Among the settlers, slaves, and indentured servants that travel across the Atlantic to the New World in the early 1600s, there is also Tony. As a child, his home in India becomes a trading outpost for the English; as an orphaned teenager, he is kidnapped in London and bound to servitude on a Virginia plantation. But Tony is not giving up on his dreams just yet. Under the rule of a sadistic plantation owner, he forms a tender bond with a young…
Unremitting tension, an elegant premise, an enthralling grasp of history, and a brilliantly vivid evocation of early Colonial New England make this story leap off the page.
Throw in that the two fugitives, despite their strong connection to each other, quarrel dangerously, forcing the reader to wonder whether radical political action—in that age or this—can ever deliver on its promise. A triumph.
'A belter of a thriller' THE TIMES 'A master storyteller . . . an important book for our particular historical moment' OBSERVER 'His best since Fatherland' SUNDAY TIMES
'From what is it they flee?' He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'
1660. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their…
A breathtaking cultural, political, and social portrayal that shows the tremendous burdens a woman carries, no matter what her class or station in life, and how becoming a healer is a subversive act.
Better yet, the protagonist, though what we’d call a feminist, is entirely of her time and place, committed to the social order, and all the more believable for that. This is historical fiction at its finest, a novel that will make you look beyond the depiction of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China to see our own society.
'Despite the inordinate limits placed on women, See allows their strengths to dominate their stories' Washington Post 'Poignant . . . quietly affecting' Time
In 15th century China two women are born under the same sign, the Metal Snake. But life will take the friends on very different paths.
According to Confucius, 'an educated woman is a worthless woman', but Tan Yunxian - born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separation and loneliness - is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. She begins her training in medicine with her grandmother and, as she navigates the…
In 1919, Rollie Birch returns a war hero to Lumberton, a (fictional) logging town in Washington, grieving his wife’s death. When he quits his father’s construction company to tend his infant daughter full-time, Lumberton is aghast, and gossips snicker that the child isn’t even his. Meanwhile, timber heiress Kay Sorensen dreams of a business career, but her lawyer husband, back from the army, interrogates her about the bank account she opened and soon tells her to quit her job. Kay wonders whether the war changed him. Rollie might know—the men served together—while Rollie thinks Kay might know whether his late wife cheated on him. But Kay and Rollie have disliked each other since high school—and in Lumberton, secrets combust once they’re shared.
