Andrew Garvald is eighteen when he flees his father's political troubles in rain-soaked Scotland, heading for Edinburgh and the civilized world. But the road has other plans. A gypsy woman's prophecy follows him; a girl singing a defiant song in the downpour haunts him; and an ill-fated stumble into Muckle John Gib's fanatical Sweet-Singers drags him across the Atlantic to the raw Virginia plantations of the late 1600s. There, among tobacco fields and desperate men fleeing the old world's constraints, Andrew discovers that education may be the least of his challenges. Buchan writes with the swashbuckling confidence of a man who believed adventure was the natural state of things, layering his narrative with real historical figures and the rough texture of two worlds in violent transition. This is a novel about the precise moment when youth collides with history, and neither emerges unchanged.
