Shaman

We meet Dr Rober Judson Cole, fleeing from his native Scotland for the New World to practise medicine in Boston and then to learn the healing powers of nature from the Sauk Indians. And we follow the career of his son, Robert Jefferson Cole – Shaman to everyone who knows him – and his family as they are drawn, along with the rest of America, into the conflict between North and South.

By turns tender and gritty, but always compelling, this is a family saga of epic proportions; a vivid depiction of two Cole doctors and the women they love, of brutal murder and of medicine emerging with a rush from the unscientific dark centuries.