Bahía de Chesapeake
1978
- fiction in english
- fiction
- native american roots
- 400 year saga
- western stories
- history
- eastern shore (md. and va)
- eastern shore (md. and va.)
- historical fiction
- fiction, historical
The story
James A. Michener's enthralling new novel tells a magnificent historical saga of our land and its people, focusing on the generations of seven brawling, burgeoning families—their failures and triumphs, their uniquely American spirit and drive—living on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake is the first work of fiction in ten years to make its debut on The New York Times Best Seller List as number one. Read this panoramic novel, and you will see why critics and readers agree that it is Michener's finest work to date.
What it’s like
Sweeping, unhurried historical fiction with the rolling scale of a family chronicle: a book to settle into over many evenings, with long stretches of tidewater marsh, oyster beds, sailing skiffs and farm fields in the mind's eye. Michener's prose is expansive and documentary in voice, plainly descriptive rather than lyrical, moving through decades with the confidence of a storyteller who likes to pause on how land, weather and work shape people. The mood is broad and warm with a steady undercurrent of hardship, more chronicle than suspense, and the pacing is deliberately slow, circling back across generations so that a place and its families accumulate weight over time. Its people are shown struggling, feuding, marrying, prospering and failing, with the arc of each household mattering more than any single crisis. Violence, cruelty and hard times appear across the centuries, including slavery and wartime, but they are part of the historical weather rather than graphic set pieces, and sexual content is frank but not explicit. It suits a long rainy weekend, a winter read, or anyone who loves the feel of a big old-fashioned saga and a sense of a region's history unfolding through its ordinary households.
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