For weeks a discredited Washington advisor waits on his sailing boat for his twenty-something stepdaughter, Hannah, to join him. Hannah is fleeing both scandal and the law. She is his favorite crew. The boat is anchored off an isolated Maine island, but it is ready to set sail across oceans. As he waits, he is enchanted by the surrounding nature, and then by the characters from the long book he is reading, Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. That old London story evokes his English mother, recently dead at nearly a hundred. Irene Forstye from the 1800s, living through a scandal, reminds him of Hannah today. The characters, existing, dead, and borrowed from fiction, collide, become acquainted with each other, and find their voices, until they present a single story. Their loves, travails, and moral crises link 1700s pre-industrial England to the present day, and to the global heating and artificial intelligence that shape Hannah’s life. Through his “short chain of human hearts” the narrator reaches to explain the age, and to imagine what comes next. When Hannah arrives, and they sail off into a storm, everyone is a Forsyte, an unbroken thread sewn through an era. 

The origins of the novel go back to when I was unable to see, and I listened to two books I had previously read, Piketty’s Capital, and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. One is a brilliant work of economic history detailing the true nature of the rise of industrial capitalism and social democracy–modern civilization. The other details the sentimental lives of several generations of industrialists living through the same transformation. I was an economist before I was a novelist and I was struck by how these twin achievements of economics and imagination beautifully complemented each other, and together might underpin a grand human understanding or the modern era. Galsworthy brought his story from 1760 up to 1930. This overlapped with my mother’s vivid London life that could lead that story into the present, while Irene Forsyte’s America life, left hanging by Galsworthy, invited further imagination, and led to Hannah, her most recent descendent, a young American eco-activist caught up in an internet scandal.