Chesapeake

In the early seventeenth century, the English fugitive Edmund Steed reaches the Chesapeake and establishes a family whose descendants become landowners and political figures. Around them, Quaker shipbuilders, enslaved Africans, watermen and Indigenous communities form rival and interdependent lines whose fortunes reflect the changing life of the bay.

The novel passes through colonial settlement, tobacco cultivation, slavery, the American Revolution, the Civil War, emancipation and the environmental pressures of the modern age. By returning to the same shorelines and families across generations, it shows how religious belief, race, wealth and the exploitation of natural resources shape both American society and the Chesapeake itself.