A career’s work from a beloved author’s first book for Dutton, Small World is a historic epic set in multiple time periods, in which the characters interconnect in the most intriguing and meaningful ways. More than anything else this restlessness, this yearning for something out of reach, or something missing, this incessant, unanswerable, unconquerable call that urged us collectively forward like a runaway locomotive, this was America.
Set in alternating scenes between the present-day travelers on a train and their ancestors more than a century before, Small World explores the Great American Experiment from its formative days to the present moment and asks whether or not our nation has made good on its promises.
Small World is a sprawling chronical of a hundred-and-seventy years of American nation-building from numerous points-of-view across place and time. The result is a historical epic with a Dickensian flair, a grand entertainment set against such iconic backdrops as the California gold rush, the development of the Continental Railroad, and a speeding train of strangers who don’t realize the history they have brought together in one place.