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A sweeping historical novel of the American West that follows the dramatic life of Daytime Smoke, Nez Perce son of explorer William Clark.
The Coming is an epic novel of native-white relations in North America, intimately told through the life of Daytime Smoke -the real-life red-haired son of William Clark and a Nez Perce woman. In 1805, Lewis and Clark stumble out of the Rockies on the edge of starvation. The Nez Perce help the explorers build canoes and navigate the rapids of the Columbia, then spend two months hosting them the following spring before leading them back across the snowbound mountains. Daytime Smoke is born not long after, and the tribe of his youth continues a deep friendship with white Americans, from fur trappers to missionaries, even aiding the United States government in wars with neighboring tribes. But when gold is discovered on Nez Perce land in 1860, it sets an inevitable tragedy in motion.
Daytime Smoke's life spanned the seven decades between first contact and the last great Indian war. Capturing the trajectory experienced by so many native peoples - from friendship and cooperation to betrayal, war, and genocide - this sweeping novel, with its large cast of characters and vast geography, braids historical events with the drama of one man's remarkable life. Rigorously researched and cinematically rendered, The Coming is a page-turning, heart-stopping American novel in a classic mode.
"Though it is too much to fit in one novel, this work of fiction reaches a level of truth that history cannot in depicting the collision between these two civilizations." - Publishers Weekly
"[Osborne] brings deep understanding to the dynamics of the white-Indian conflict, and his novel makes fascinating and informative reading." - Booklist
"An epic story sure to be a hit with readers interested in the American western expansion." - Kirkus
This information about The Coming was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Osborne is the author or co-author of five nonfiction books: Laboratories of Democracy; Reinventing Government, a New York Times bestseller; Banishing Bureaucracy; The Reinventor's Fieldbook; and The Price of Government. He has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and many other publications. Osborne is currently a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, directing the Reinventing America's Schools Project. He lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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