Brookland

Since her girlhood, Prudence Winship has gazed across the tidal straits from her home in Brooklyn to the city of Manhattan and yearned to bridge the distance. Now, established as the owner of the enormously successful gin distillery she inherited from her father, she can begin to realize her dream. Set in eighteenth-century Brooklyn, this is the story of a woman with a vision: a gargantuan construction of timber and masonry she devises to cross the East River in a single magnificent span. With the help of her sisters - the high spirited Tem and the silent, uncanny Pearl - she fires the imaginations of the people of Brooklyn and New York by promising them both easy passage between their two worlds and one of the most ambitious public works ever attempted. Beautifully written and breathtaking in scope, Brookland turns imagination and luminous prose into precision instruments that measure how cracks in a foundation can undo the most solid seeming of structures - (The Christian Science Monitor).