Strange Yesterday — Howard Fast

Fast's epic novel, about one man's family tree stretching through history from the Revolutionary War, portrays the best and worst of the American experiment

Broken and sick, a young Revolutionary War soldier from New York is taken in by an innkeeper's family and nursed to health. The soldier, John Preswick, falls in love with the innkeeper's daughter, even as his wife Inez waits back home. Through five generations, the two families he starts share an intertwined fate. The Preswicks take part in some of the country's most significant episodes, from the Civil War to the California Gold Rush, with fortunes discovered, lost, and made on the backs of others.

A tenacious chronicler of American history, Howard Fast was one of the most prolific historical novelists of the twentieth century. Strange Yesterday is perhaps his most sweeping, ambitious novel.