In the Land of Whispers

Brilliantly read by Nigel Gore, this audiobook joins together George Robert Minkoff’s three critically acclaimed historical novels about the founding of the first English colony at Jamestown - The Weight of Smoke, The Dragons of the Storm, and The Leaves of Fate. The novels are visionary epics chronicling lesser-known aspects of the Elizabethan world, including the importance of alchemy to Queen Elizabeth and her court. The canvas is vast, intertwining the life of John Smith, as a narrator, with that of Sir Francis Drake, the great Elizabethan explorer.

Four hundred years after the founding of Jamestown, the lives of Captain John Smith, Powhatan, and Pocahontas assume their true dimensions in this far-ranging saga of the beginnings of the British Empire. The English came to the New World to found a utopia. Instead they founded a slave state. The only English voice of reason and the first true American hero became an outcast - and then forgotten.

Superbly narrated by British actor Nigel Gore, The Dragons of the Storm follows directly on from where The Weight of Smoke left off. Captain John Smith has been stabbed by a stingray and falls deathly ill. The old alchemist and mariner, Jonas Profit, doctors his wound, and to ease Smith’s suffering tells of the daring circumnavigation of the world by Francis Drake, 1577-1580. A masterful interweaving of all the elements that contributed to the birth of the British Empire.

The Leaves of Fate is the third and final volume of the epic fictional chronicle, In the Land of Whispers. Here we find the hero of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, forced to return to England, never to set foot again in the colony. Beyond his compelling memories of life in Jamestown, with its famine, disease, and discord, lies the sordid history of the rapacious greed of desperate colonists and wealthy London financiers who develop tobacco as a cash crop in lieu of food.