"Western Australia, 1886. After months at sea, a slow boat makes its passage from London to the shores of Bannin Bay. The sea is a shocking blue, and gulls float above battered mangrove jetties. From the deck, young Eliza Brightwell and her family eye their strange new home. Here is an unforgiving land where fortune sits patiently at the bottom of the ocean. A land where pearl shells bloom to the size of soup plates. Where men are coaxed into unthinkable...

"He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. -- Job 30:19 (NKJV) Jim Robbins is a dead man, and he knows it. He's fought Yankee and Pawnee, fought for the love of two very different women, fought for his very survival. Now, as the scenes of his life flash before him, his greatest struggle is about to begin. Wounded in a railroad explosion, Jim reviews those moments that shaped him. From the inequities of the Antebellum South,...