This sweeping historical novel tells the story of the Trail of Tears as it has never been told before Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar has traveled to America from the filthy streets of East London in search of a better life. But Abe's visions of a privileged apprenticeship in the Sassaporta Brothers' empire are soon replaced with the grim reality of indentured servitude in Greensborough, North Carolina. Some fifty miles west, Dark Water of the Mountains leads a life of irreverent solitude. The daughter of a powerful Cherokee chief, it has been nearly twenty years since she renounced her family's plans for her to marry a wealthy white man. Far away in Georgia, a black slave named Jacob has resigned himself to a life of loss and injustice in a Cherokee city of refuge for criminals. A trio of outsiders linked by love and friendship, Abe, Dark Water, and Jacob face the horrors of President Jackson's Indian Removal Act as the tribes of the South make the grueling journey across the Mississippi River and into Oklahoma.
"Mary Glickman's powerful new novel is the finest depiction of the infamous Trail of Tears that I've ever read. The forced removal of the Cherokee nation from its ancestral homeland in the southern Appalachia and its forced relocation in Oklahoma is one of the darkest and most fascinating dramas of a shameful American past. Glickman turns this to literature by her brilliant portrayal of three unfo
Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini
"An astonishing eye-opener, a brand new story of a people and a past, the history of which Glickman shows us we took for granted. In Glickman's work, we truly inhabit a New World, and it is one, though long lost and vanished, we inhabit in the world of today, a world of many tears, many trails."
Bernie Schein, author of Famous All Over Town
"A sympathetic, well-executed historical novel... In this tale of three ordinary, eminently relatable people, the author adeptly sets Abe's story against the backdrop of Andrew Jackson's shameful, greedy relocation of the Cherokees and the land grab of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.... Glickman does an outstanding job of weaving together the narratives of her three disparate characters."
