In the Land of Whispers

Four hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, the lives of Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas assume their true dimensions in this far-ranging saga of the beginnings of the British Empire. The English came to the New World to found a utopia. Instead they founded a slave state. The only English voice of reason and the first true American hero became an outcast - and then forgotten. George Robert Minkoff presents a rich, authentic tale about the disastrous first 18 months of the Jamestown Colony, 1607-1609. Entwined with the colony's fractious beginnings are the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, retold around the campfires by an old alchemist, Jonas Profit, who sailed the Spanish Main with Queen Elizabeth's favorite pirate. Appropriately, these tales are told in a language rich with metaphorical power, flavored with Elizabethan authenticity, and read with power and authenticity by Nigel Gore.

The Dragons of the Storm continues directly from The Weight of Smoke. When Powhatan forcibly adopted Captain John Smith into his tribe, he declared that after three wounds the river would speak to him. While fishing in the Chesapeake toward the end of a long expedition, Smith is stabbed by a stingray and falls deathly ill. Because he is set to assume the presidency of Jamestown on their return, the fate of the colony may depend upon his recovery. The old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, doctors this second wound, and to ease Smith's suffering starts to tell of the daring circumnavigation of the world by Francis Drake. So begins the second volume of George Robert Minkoff's visionary epic, In the Land of Whispers, revealing the desperate events in the lives of both Drake and Smith that will lead finally to a permanent settlement for the Elizabethans in the New World. John Smith is followed from the initiations of the first volume into a year of unforeseen trials and their consequence: while the London Company's aristocrats broker the colony's fate with their wealth and power, the colonists struggle an ocean away just to survive in an unforgiving land. Famine, contagion, mutiny, and war with Powhatan threaten constantly. Among the 'gentlemen,' ignorance and arrogance joust with greed for supremacy. And the one man who might save Jamestown from itself, John Smith, will have to confront not only the venality of his enemies, and the legacy of his spiritual fathers, but the mysteries of his own destiny. If only history books were written like this. The Dragons of the Storm is a literary banquet best savored slowly like fine wine and just as intoxicating." ~ J.M. Cornwell, Authorlink

The Leaves of Fate is the third and final volume of the epic fictional chronicle In the Land of Whispers. Here, we find the hero of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, forced to return to England, never to set foot again in the colony. Beyond his compelling memories of life in Jamestown, with its famine, disease, and discord, lies the sordid history of the rapacious greed of desperate colonists and wealthy London financiers who develop tobacco as a cash crop in lieu of food. Even a reunion with Pocahontas is brief and bittersweet, but despite continuing hardship and neglect, Smith becomes the best-selling author of his time. The concluding volume of Minkoff's heavyweight Jamestown trilogy (The Weight of Smoke; The Dragons of the Storm) covers 1610 to 1630 and offers a detailed history of the English colonies told in flowery Elizabethan English ('I am all that I know, a motion sensed, a current from forgetfulness'). A fitting wrap-up to an impressive trilogy, this expansive epic will surely please series fans with its authenticity, intrigue, and stylistic verve." (Publishers Weekly) No author that I know of has brought home Jamestown's trials and tribulations more vividly than Minkoff.... It is obvious that Mr. Minkoff has done an enormous amount of research on the periods he covers. Any reader who enjoys having history come alive will benefit from acquiring and reading all three volumes of In the Land of Whispers." (Virginia Gazette)