Five brothers - five separate dreamers - all trying to prove themselves to a dead, dictatorial father. Born in the dying decades of the Cornish mining boom they fight and battle their way along different paths in a bid to discover themselves, encountering love, disappointment, futility and fraternal disputes as they do so.
Their stories sometimes interweave as life, and decisions they have no control over, throw them off course, or tempt them to try their luck, like so many others of their stock, across the Atlantic - in the wild evolving landscape of America with its burgeoning mines and its own gold-rush dreamers.
Nathan, the eldest of the Roseveans, and Billy, the youngest, seek their destiny across the water, both ending up in Tombstone at the time the Wyatt brothers storm into town. Back in Cornwall James, the second Rosevean brother, claws his way up the social and financial ladder, thanks to the daughter of a much richer man, while the other siblings remaining on Cornish soil, go their diverse ways. Samuel, sullen and stubborn, looks only to carve out an independent path, while Alex seeks to alter the status quo of his small part of society.
Their searches for their own separate identities, and for love, take place against a backdrop of an ancient way of life which is being drawn, often against its will, into a newer era - and an emergent country in another continent where miners are also seeking to find fortunes from the 'treasure' beneath the earth's crust.
Beginning in the 1870s, the novel charts the brothers' lives through the following decade, and then into the 1880s, as the Cornwall they were born into starts to alter around them, and they strive to ensure that they make a worthwhile mark on the world, wherever they finally put down lasting roots.
Their stories sometimes interweave as life, and decisions they have no control over, throw them off course, or tempt them to try their luck, like so many others of their stock, across the Atlantic - in the wild evolving landscape of America with its burgeoning mines and its own gold-rush dreamers.
Nathan, the eldest of the Roseveans, and Billy, the youngest, seek their destiny across the water, both ending up in Tombstone at the time the Wyatt brothers storm into town. Back in Cornwall James, the second Rosevean brother, claws his way up the social and financial ladder, thanks to the daughter of a much richer man, while the other siblings remaining on Cornish soil, go their diverse ways. Samuel, sullen and stubborn, looks only to carve out an independent path, while Alex seeks to alter the status quo of his small part of society.
Their searches for their own separate identities, and for love, take place against a backdrop of an ancient way of life which is being drawn, often against its will, into a newer era - and an emergent country in another continent where miners are also seeking to find fortunes from the 'treasure' beneath the earth's crust.
Beginning in the 1870s, the novel charts the brothers' lives through the following decade, and then into the 1880s, as the Cornwall they were born into starts to alter around them, and they strive to ensure that they make a worthwhile mark on the world, wherever they finally put down lasting roots.
