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A Novel of Early Manhattan
by Beverly SwerlingRich with unforgettable characters and history, intricately plotted and utterly absorbing, City of Dreams is a stirring saga of early Manhattan and the beginnings of medical science told by a master storyteller.
In 1661, Lucas Turner and his sister, Sally, stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven weeks at sea to make a fresh start in the rough and rowdy Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam.
Lucas, a barber surgeon, and Sally, an apothecary, are both gifted healers and bound to each other by blood and necessity. Yet as their new lives unfold, lust, betrayal, and murder will make them deadly enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, both make choices that will burden their descendants -- dedicated physicians and surgeons, pirates and whoremasters -- with a legacy of secrets and retribution. That heritage sets cousin against cousin, physician against surgeon, and ultimately, patriot against Tory.
In a city where slaves are burned alive on Wall Street, where James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams walk The Broad Way arguing America's destiny, and where one of the greatest hospitals in the world is born in former shipwrights' workshops by the East River, the fortunes of the two families are inextricably entwined. Their pride and ambition, their loves and hates, and their willingness to live by their own rules will shape the future of medicine, and the becoming of the dream that is New York.
CONTENTS
BOOK I: THE LITTLE MUSQUASH PATH
June 1661-October 1664
BOOK II: THE SEEING FAR PATH
December 1711-June 1714
BOOK III: THE HIGH HILLS PATH
August 1731-February 1737
BOOK IV: THE SHIVERING CLIFFS PATH
August 1737-November 1737
BOOK V: THE CLAWS TEAR OUT EYES PATH
September 1759-July 1760
BOOK VI: THE PATH OF FLAMES
July 1765-December 1765
BOOK VII: WAR PATH
August 1776-March 1784
EPILOGUE: THE PATH OF DREAMS
June 1798
Chapter I
Eleven weeks in a ship thirty-seven feet long by eleven wide, carrying a crew of nine as well as twenty passengers. Lurching and lunging and tossing on the Atlantic swells, the sails creaking night and day, spread above them like some evil bird of prey. Hovering, waiting for death.
The dung buckets on the open deck were screened only by a scanty calico curtain that blew aside more often than it stayed in place. For Sally Turner the dung buckets were the worst.
She was twenty-three years old -- ...
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