James A. Michener · 1978 · global

James Michener's 1978 novel, four hundred years on one estuary. An English Catholic fleeing persecution, a Quaker family, a line of watermen, an enslaved family and a plantation dynasty all work the same rivers of Maryland's eastern shore - and the book follows the marsh, the oyster beds and the geese as closely as it follows the people.

1. 1
   Bristol

   Edmund Steed leaves England to escape the penalties laid on Catholics, taking ship for a colony where the promises are large and the specifics vague - the first of several arrivals the book will stage on the same shore.

2. 2
   Jamestown

   He lands in Virginia and finds Jamestown a place of fever, hunger and factional quarrels, where a Catholic is barely more welcome than he was at home - and works his way north out of it to find water nobody has claimed.

3. 3
   The Choptank

   On the Choptank, a broad tidal river running deep into the eastern shore, he finds the marshes, oyster beds and stands of oak that will hold four centuries of the story - and the Choptank people already living there.

4. 4
   Devon Island

   The Steeds settle Devon Island at the river's mouth and build the plantation, and with it the tobacco economy, the slave quarters and the long argument between the great house and the watermen that runs to the end of the book.

5. 5
   Baltimore

   Upstream and up the centuries, Baltimore grows into the money and the politics of the bay - clippers, canneries, railroads and finally the runoff and the dying oyster beds that close the novel in the 1970s.