Vol. III of In the Land of Whispers
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Purchase the three-volume set.
The third and final volume of an epic fictional chronicle, In the Land of Whispers. The three books present the extraordinary histories of the hero of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, and the great Elizabethan explorer before him, Sir Francis Drake. Smith's journals record the events of his own life, and reprise the tales told him around the campfires at Jamestown by Jonas Profit, an alchemist who accompanied Drake on his voyages.
In this final volume Smith is forced to return to England, never to set foot again in Jamestown. Profit has died, but not before passing along the final scenes of Drake's downfall, as well as that of Profit's teacher, the alchemist John Dee. Despite a subsequent expedition to map the New England coast, Smith is cast aside by the Virginia Company, and reduced to the role of a keening witness, all the while the colonies move inexorably toward becoming a slave economy built around the cultivation of tobacco. In London, Smith's reunion with Pocahontas in England is brief and bittersweet, but despite continuing hardship and neglect, Smith becomes the best-selling author of his time.
The first volume is concerned with initiation. The second volume with trial and expulsion. This final volume is the book of exile.
Read a sample chapter: Chapter One (PDF)
Read the ForeWord review by Trina Carter: The Leaves of Fate
"The concluding volume of Minkoiff's heavyweight Jamestown trilogy...covers 1610 to 1630 and offers a detailed history of the English colonies told in flowery Elizabethan English.... As the story opens, Capt. John Smith, our narrator, has been exiled from Jamestown by political enemies and forced to return to England, where he writes wildly popular books about the colonies and reminisces in flashbacks to his days as an explorer, soldier, and colonizer; his love for Pocahontas;...battles with Indians; and England's many clashes with Spain. Best, however, are Smith's descriptions of life in Jamestown, with its famine, disease, and discord, as well as the rapacious greed of desperate colonists and wealthy London financiers who develop cash crop tobacco in lieu of food, a lament that lives in Smith through a brief reunion with Pocahontas and a crushing denouement. A fitting wrapup to an impressive trilogy, this expansive epic will surely please series fans with its authenticity, intrigue, and stylistic verve."
--Publishers Weekly
"No author that I know of has brought home [Jamestown's] trials and tribulations more vividly than Minkoff . . . Yes, this volume, along with the first two of the series, is a novel, but it is based on the 'real world' in the Jamestown Colony in the early 1600s. It is obvious that Mr. Minkoff has done an enormous amount of research on the periods he covers. Any reader who enjoys having history come alive will benefit from acquiring and reading all three volumes of In the Land of Whispers."
-- Robert Shultis, Virginia Gazette
"The final volume of Berkshires author Minkoff’s magisterial trilogy is not literary fast food. Exquisitely wrought narration rewards patient readers with a richly detailed chronicle of Captain John Smith’s exile from a beleaguered Jamestown and the rise of tobacco, often in images of startling beauty. Minkoff’s visionary epic has gained a cult following, including Paul Auster and Richard Ford."
--Chronogram