The Odyssey Bookshop: John Sayles

Join us in person on Wednesday, March 29 at 7 PM as John Sayles presents his new novel, Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade's Journey. He will be joined in conversation by Daniel Czitrom.

About the Book

Spanning 13 years, two continents, several wars, and many smoke-filled and bloody battlefields, John Sayles’s thrilling historical and cinematic epic invites comparison with Diana Gabaldon, George R. R. Martin, Phillippa Gregory, and Charles Dickens.

It begins in the highlands of Scotland in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, the last desperate stand of the Stuart ‘pretender’ to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his rabidly loyal supporters.  Vanquished with his comrades by the forces of the Hanoverian (and Protestant) British crown, the novel’s eponymous hero, Jamie MacGillivray, narrowly escapes a roadside execution only to be recaptured by the victors and shipped to Marshalsea Prison (central to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times) where he cheats the hangman a second time before being sentenced to transportation and indentured servitude in colonial America "for the term of his natural life."  His travels are paralleled by those of Jenny Ferguson, a poor, village girl swept up on false charges by the English and also sent in chains to the New World.

The novel follows Jamie and Jenny through servitude, revolt, escape, and romantic entanglements -- pawns in a deadly game.  The two continue to cross paths with each other and with some of the leading figures of the era- the devious Lord Lovat, future novelist Henry Fielding, the artist William Hogarth, a young and ambitious George Washington, the doomed General James Wolfe, and the Lenape chief feared throughout the Ohio Valley as Shingas the Terrible.

About the Author

John Sayles is a much-celebrated film director who has made 18 movies, including Passion Fish and Lone Star which both earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. As an author, Sayles has written numerous novels and short stories, including Union Dues, which was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Connecticut and Los Angeles.

About Daniel Czitrom

Daniel Czitrom recently retired as Professor of History on the Ford Foundation at Mount Holyoke College. He is author most recently of New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal That Launched the Progressive Era (Oxford, 2016; pb,2018). Czitrom is also the author of Rediscovering Jacob Riis (2008); Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982); and co-author of Out of Many: A History of the American People (9th ed., 2020). He is co-author, with Jack Gilhooley, of two historical dramas, Red Bessie (2003), produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Triangle (2011), produced Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters. He has served for 35 years on the Board of Governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), including a term as its Chair from 1990-1994. Czitrom has been deeply engaged with bringing history to wider audiences beyond the academy. From 2011-2013, he served as the historical advisor for Copper, an original dramatic series set in Civil War-era New York City and broadcast over BBC America. Czitrom has also appeared frequently on PBS as a featured on-camera commentator for numerous documentary film projects, including Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip (2020); Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People (2019); The Rise and Fall of Penn Station (2014); and New York: A Documentary Film (1999).

Visit https://www.odysseybks.com/event/john-sayles-person or email events@odysseybks.com for more information.