Rutherfurd celebrates America's greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga that showcases his extraordinary ability to combine impeccable historical research and storytelling flair. As in his earlier, bestselling novels, he illuminates cultural, social, and political upheavals through the lives of a remarkably diverse set of families. As he recounts the intertwining fates of characters rich and poor, black and white, native-born and immigrant, Rutherfurd brings to life the momentous events that shaped New York and America and Britain's unique place in the city's history: the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial centre, the excesses of Gilded Age, the horror of the Civil War, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near-demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 90s, and the attacks on the World Trade Centre.