This "story of passion, possession, and a painful education in love"
(Sarah Dunant, author of In the Name of the Family), spanning several
decades in 17th-century Great Britain and America, evocatively explores
the power of nature versus man and man versus woman by "a lovely writer
[who] can take your breath away" (The New York Times Book Review).
I am an engineer and a measured man of the world. I prefer to weigh
everything in the balance, to calculate and to plan. Yet my own heart is
going faster than I can now count.
In 1649, Jan Brunt arrives in Great Britain from the Netherlands to work
on draining and developing an expanse of marshy wetlands known as the
Great Level. It is here in this wild country that he meets Eliza, a
local woman whose love overturns his ordered vision. Determined to help
her strive beyond her situation, Jan is heedless of her devotion to her
home and way of life. When she uses the education Jan has given her to
sabotage his work, Eliza is brutally punished, and Jan flees to the New
World.
In the American colonies, profiteers are hungry for viable land to
develop, and Jan's skills as an engineer are highly prized. His
prosperous new life is rattled, however, on a spring morning when a boy
delivers a note that prompts him to remember the Great Level, and
confront all that was lost there. Eliza has made it to the New World and
is once again using the education Jan gave her to bend the
landscape--this time to find her own place of freedom.
Perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel and Geraldine Brooks, Call Upon the
Water is "a haunting book with characters who stay with the reader as
their lives unfold like a sea mist" (Philippa Gregory, New York Times
bestselling author).
Note: This book was published in the UK under the title The Great
Level.
