Boston:
A Novel of America is a saga of four families whose stories bring
vibrantly to life the passion and pageant of the city that
gave birth to America.
A
cast of unforgettable fictional characters share a stage of
centuries with the real-life heroes and rascals of Boston,
from Puritan saints with a glorious vision of a "City on a
Hill" to liberty's sons raining fire on the English below
Dorchester Heights, from globe-girdling China traders to Irish
ward bosses conquering the Athens of America street by street.
This
is Boston seen at ground level, a rattling tale on cobblestone
streets and bustling wharves, the lore of captains and castaways,
merchant princes and servants, zealots and dissenters. Their
adventures sweep from the wild fens of Lincolnshire to the
streets of seventeenth-century London, from the blighted hills
of County Cork to battlefields of the American Civil War,
from Cape Horn to savage Nootka Sound and Whampoa on the Canton
River, and in World War II across the violent Atlantic to
Murmansk, Russia.
Boston
is an intensely human story chronicling the triumphs and tragedies
of generations who make Shawmut peninsula their home. Massachusett
Indians combating terrifying Abnaki raiders at the site of
the future Scollay Square; Quakers executed on Boston Common's
hanging tree; Puritans reveling in the rat pits and brothels
of Mount Whoredom. Cudgel boys beating Redcoats black and
blue; Irish mothers scrambling for a foothold on Jacob's Ladder;
Broadcloth mobs storming Tremont Temple to smash Abolitionists;
African-Americans marching down Beacon Street going to fight
and die for freedom.
Brahmin
autocrats buttressing the ramparts of Beacon Street; Catholic
bullies chasing down Jews on Blue Hill Avenue; yellow buses
driving black and white students across a divided city; workers
from thirty nations coming together for the Big Dig . . .
A monumental cast, real and fictional, shaping the destiny
of old and new Boston, itself like a living entity ever changing
and re-defining its limits.
