Seven Dreams

Seven Dreams is William T. Vollmann’s projected seven-volume cycle about the collisions between Indigenous peoples and European colonisers in North America. The published novels range from Norse voyages to Greenland and Vinland through the Jesuit missions of New France, the founding of Jamestown, the Nez Perce War and John Franklin’s search for the Northwest Passage. Each volume combines extensive documentary research with invented voices, myth and journeys through the modern landscapes in which these histories remain visible.

The books do not form one continuous plot, but recurring narrators, methods and moral questions bind them together. Vollmann repeatedly tests colonial records against Indigenous memory and asks how exploration, conversion and settlement become systems of possession and violence. The numbering follows the planned seven-volume design: the published sequence represented here contains volumes 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, while the fourth and seventh volumes remain unpublished.