The Cinder Buggy: A Fable in Iron and Steel

New Damascus is dying. The iron rails that once carried a nation's ambition are rusting beneath engines that have grown too heavy, too fast, and the men who built this town with their hands and their sweat are watching the future leave them behind. But Aaron Breakspeare believes he can save them. His quest to perfect the manufacture of steel rails will either resurrect the town or shatter everyone in it. Through the clatter of the cinder buggy and the glow of molten metal, Garet Garrett tells a story that pulses with the raw energy of early industrial America - where fortunes are made and lost in a week, where love blooms between men and women shaped by harder things than sentiment, and where the question of what we owe to progress and what progress owes to us remains unanswered. Written in the early 1920s but set in the decades when the steel age was still a daring dream, this novel captures a pivotal moment when everything humanity could build was still on the horizon. For readers who find poetry in pistons and romance in rails.