"Departing the shores of Ireland, a young man named Cormac O'Connor sets out on a fateful journey to avenge the deaths of his parents and honor the code of his ancestors. His quest brings him to the settlement of New York, seething with tensions between English and Irish, whites and blacks, British and "Americans," where he is swept up in a tide of conspiracy and violence. In return for aiding an African shaman who was brought to America in chains, Cormac is given an otherworldy gift.

He will live forever as long as he never leaves the island of Manhattan." "So unfolds the story of the intertwined lives of a man and a city. Cormac comes to know all the buried secrets of Manhattan - the way it has been shaped by greed, race, and waves of immigration, by the unleashing of enormous human energies, and, above all, by hope. Through Cormac's eyes, we watch the city grow from a tiny community on the tip of an untamed wilderness to become the thriving metropolis of the present day.".

"A writer, a painter, a man of sensual appetites, Cormac is most of all a man of his times. He is an insurrectionist, abetting a slave revolt in the early days of the colony. He is a revolutionary, taking up arms in the war of independence. He is an activist, taking up a pen to bear witness to social injustice. And he is a chronicler of Manhattan, from its triumphs to its greatest catastrophe.".

"Through it all, Cormac must fight, generation after generation, a force of evil that returns relentlessly in the scions of a single family. It is a family whose path first crossed his in Ireland and whose persistence put at risk all his hopes for fulfilling his destiny. As he searches out these blood enemies, he must watch everyone he touches slip away: the men at whose side he has fought, the friends he has treasured, the women he has loved.

And so he seeks the one who can change his fate, the mysterious dark lady who alone can free him from the blessing and the curse of his long life."--BOOK JACKET.