From the author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank comes this historical novel about Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea, and his sojourn as a young man in 1820s Paris. Born in 1805 on the Lewis and Clark expedition, Baptiste was the son of the expedition's translators, Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau. Thad Carhart portrays this mixed-blood child's mysterious boyhood along the Missouri among the Mandan tribe and his youth as William Clark's ward in St. Louis. The novel then becomes a haunting exploration of identity and passion as 18-year-old Baptiste is invited to cross the Atlantic in 1823 with young Duke Paul of Württemberg.
"Carhart writes with a sensuousness enhanced by patience and grounded by the humble acquisition of new insight into music, his childhood, and his relationship to the city of Paris."—The New Yorker
