by John E. Cashwell

THE ADVENTURE BEGINS HERE: [Book I: 'In Words and Dreams and Song'] Spanning more than 1,300 years and over forty-four generations, Toishan bookmarks, at key points in time, the contributions of the Chinese men and women who built the American railroads. Launching a delicate 5th Century junk from Toi-Shan Province in CE 499, the Most High Buddhist Priest Hoei-shin Ti initiates an incredible journey up the west coast of Japan, north past the Korean peninsula, along the Aleutian Islands, southeast to Alaska, down the west coast of North America, to California. In 1865, some 1,366 years later, his descendants and those of Sir Quentin Gnarr Roberts, an Irish immigrant, are conjoined in the most eloquent material work of both races. The construction of America's Intercontinental Railroad. In six spellbinding works, the author chronicles the return of the Chinese to California, and the arrival of the Irish, in a highly imaginative but completely believable alternate history of the discovery and ultimate assimilation of the American West.