Vorab-RezensentenRobert Morgan

In his latest historical novel, bestselling author Robert Morgan brings to full and vivid life the story of Jonah Williams, who, in 1850, on his eighteenth birthday, flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born a slave. He takes with him only a few stolen coins, a knife, and the clothes on his back–no shoes, no map, no clear idea of where to head, except north, following a star that he prays will be his guide. Hiding during the day and running through the night, Jonah must elude the men sent to capture him and the bounty hunters out to claim the reward on his head. There is one person, however, who, once on his trail, never lets him fully out of sight: Angel, herself a slave, yet with a remarkably free spirit. In Jonah, she sees her own way to freedom, and so sets out to follow him. Bristling with breathtaking adventure, Chasing the North Star is deftly grounded in historical fact yet always gripping and poignant as the story follows Jonah and Angel through the close calls and narrow escapes of a fearsome world. It is a celebration of the power of the human spirit to persevere in the face of great adversity. And it is Robert Morgan at his considerable best.

In Chasing the North Star, Morgan brings to full and vivid life the story of a runaway slave named Jonah Williams who, on his eighteenth birthday, flees the South Carolina plantation on which he was born with only a few stolen coins, a knife, and the clothes on his back. No shoes, no map, no clear idea of where to head, except north, hiding during the day and running through the night. Although Jonah eludes the men sent to capture him, the one person who never loses his trail is Angel, a slave girl he meets in North Carolina, a young woman with a remarkably free spirit who sees Jonah as her way to freedom and sets out to follow him. Morgan’s clear, plain prose brings an urgency and authenticity to this spellbinding story of two teenage runaways and their terrifying world. Filled with adventure and romance, Chasing the North Star is storytelling of the highest caliber.

Strong-willed Annie Richards Powell, a preacher’s wife raised by hardscrabble dirt farmers, begins her story on the worst day in her family’s life: a day that arrived years after her family’s trip—by wagon and on foot—from Gap Creek, South Carolina, to Green River, North Carolina, and into the home where she would grow up with her siblings, Effie, Velmer, and, finally, Troy, the baby and golden boy. A resilient and clear-eyed narrator, she lets us watch as one-by-one the Richards children create their own histories, which include both triumphs and terrible losses in the face of the Great Depression and then World War II and its aftermath. Through the Richards family, Morgan explores modern American history as it played out in the Blue Ridge Mountains—a region cut off from mainstream life until World War II took those mountain boys to fight in far-off lands and changed their world forever. The rough-hewn beauty of the land and its people are visible on every page of The Road from Gap Creek—a tribute to an ordinary family persevering through extraordinary times. This is Robert Morgan at his finest. The saga of the Richards family began in Robert Morgan’s 1999 novel Gap Creek, an Oprah Book Club Selection that attracted hundreds of thousands of readers to its beguiling tale of the first year and a half of Annie’s parents’ marriage at the turn of the twentieth century. Now, in a masterful weaving of fact and fiction, Morgan introduces a new generation looking ahead to the uncertainties of the future, the struggle to define oneself, and the rediscovery of enduring love.

When Robert Morgan’s novel Gap Creek was published in 1999, it became an Oprah Book Club Selection and an instant national bestseller, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers to its story of a marriage begun with love and hope at the turn of the twentieth century. Set in the Appalachian South, it followed Julie and Hank Richards as they struggled through the first year and a half of their union. But what, readers asked, of the years that followed? What did the future hold for these memorable characters? The Road from Gap Creek holds the answers to these questions, as Robert Morgan takes us back into their lives, telling their story and the stories of their children through the eyes of their youngest daughter, Annie. Through Annie, we watch as the four Richards children create their own histories, lives that include both triumphs and hardship in the face of the Great Depression and then World War II. Much more than a sequel, The Road from Gap Creek is a moving and indelible portrait of people and their world in a time of unprecedented change, an American story told by one of our country’s most acclaimed writers.

AUDIO EDITION. Read by David Drummond.Thomas Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies: the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.Known also for his powerful fiction (Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure, Brave Enemies), Morgan uses his skill at characterization to give life to the personalities of these ten Americans without whom the United States might well have ended at the Arkansas border. Their stories—and those of the nameless thousands who risked their lives to settle on the frontier, displacing thousands of Native Americans—form an extraordinary chapter in American history that led directly to the cataclysm of the Civil War.