Summary and Reviews of City of Dreams by Beverly Swerling

Book Summary

Rich with unforgettable characters and history, intricately plotted and utterly absorbing, City of Dreams is a stirring saga of early Manhattan and the beginnings of medical science told by a master storyteller.

In 1661, Lucas Turner and his sister, Sally, stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven weeks at sea to make a fresh start in the rough and rowdy Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam.

Lucas, a barber surgeon, and Sally, an apothecary, are both gifted healers and bound to each other by blood and necessity. Yet as their new lives unfold, lust, betrayal, and murder will make them deadly enemies. In their struggle to survive in the New World, both make choices that will burden their descendants -- dedicated physicians and surgeons, pirates and whoremasters -- with a legacy of secrets and retribution. That heritage sets cousin against cousin, physician against surgeon, and ultimately, patriot against Tory.

In a city where slaves are burned alive on Wall Street, where James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams walk The Broad Way arguing America's destiny, and where one of the greatest hospitals in the world is born in former shipwrights' workshops by the East River, the fortunes of the two families are inextricably entwined. Their pride and ambition, their loves and hates, and their willingness to live by their own rules will shape the future of medicine, and the becoming of the dream that is New York.