New York

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A brilliant mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs, this work gloriously captures the search for freedom and prosperity at the heart of America's history. This blockbuster masterpiece combines breathtaking scope with narrative immediacy, tracing the history of New York through the lenses of several families: the Van Dycks, a wealthy Dutch trading family; the Masters, members of an English merchant clan torn apart during the Revolution; the Hudsons, slaves fighting for freedom over generations; the Murphys, who escape the Irish Famine to land in the chaotic slum of Five Points; the Rewards, robber barons of the Gilded Age; the Florinos, an immigrant Italian clan building skyscrapers in the 1920s; and the Rabinowitzs, who flee anti-Semitism in Europe to build a new life in Brooklyn. Over time, the lives of these families become intertwined through momentous events in America’s fabric: the founding of the colonies, the Revolution, the growth of New York as a major port, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration, the corruption of Tammany Hall, the rise of New York as a world city, the trials of World War II, the tumult of the 1960s, the near-demise of the city in the 1970s, its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, culminating in the World Trade Center attacks at the beginning of the new century. This is the book that Rutherfurd's fans have been waiting for.