From the author of The Water Dancers and Good Family, an
exquisitely crafted novel, set in Ohio in the decades leading to
the Civil War, that illuminates the immigrant experience, the
injustice of slavery, and the debts human beings owe to one
another, witnessed through the endeavors of one Irish-American
family. Cheated out of their family estate in Northern Ireland
after the Napoleonic Wars, the Givens family arrives in America in
1819. But in coming to this new land, they have lost nearly
everything. Making their way west they settle in Cincinnati, a
burgeoning town on the banks of the mighty Ohio River whose rise,
like the Givenses' own, will be fashioned by the colliding forces
of Jacksonian populism, religious evangelism, industrial
capitalism, and the struggle for emancipation. After losing their
mother in childbirth and their father to a riverboat headed for New
Orleans, James, Olivia, and Erasmus Givens must fend for
themselves. Ambitious James eventually marries into a prosperous
family, builds a successful business, and rises in Cincinnati
society. Taken by the spirit and wanderlust, Erasmus becomes an
itinerant preacher, finding passion and heartbreak as he seeks God.
Independent-minded Olivia, seemingly destined for spinsterhood,
enters into a surprising partnership and marriage with Silas
Orpheus, a local doctor who spurns social mores. When her husband
suddenly dies from an infection, Olivia travels to his family home
in Kentucky, where she meets his estranged brother and encounters
the horrors of slavery firsthand. After abetting the escape of one
slave, Olivia is forced to confront the status of a young woman
named Tilly, another slave owned by Olivia's brother-in-law. When
her attempt to help Tilly ends in disaster, Olivia tracks down
Erasmus, who has begun smuggling runaways across the river-the
borderline between freedom and slavery. As the years pass, this
family of immigrants initially indifferent to slavery will actively
work for its end-performing courageous, often dangerous,
occasionally foolhardy acts of moral rectitude that will
reverberate through their lives for generations to come.
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