Eden's Clock

<p><b><i>A disabled Civil War veteran makes an epic, westward journey toward a fateful encounter with author Jack London, only hours before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake</i></b></p><p>Rendered mute at the Battle of Gettysburg, Frederick Heigold returns to Dobbs Ferry, New York, where he marries a resolute suffragist and resumes his vocation as a clocksmith. Bereft after she dies in a freak accident, he accepts a commission to repair the enormous clock on the San Francisco Embarcadero, but the routine railway journey becomes a six-month odyssey. Finally reaching the Pacific, after having survived imprisonment, shipwreck on Edisto Island, and run-ins with assorted roughnecks and thieves, he happens upon novelist Jack London drinking in the Palace Hotel bar—just before one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history.</p><p><i>Eden’s Clock</i>, the twelfth and final stand-alone book in The American Novels series, calls into question the American belief in individualism to shape our destiny when confronted with irrepressible, chaotic forces.</p>