What if John Milton. Cromwell's secretary: anticipating the king's return to London, had decided to flee England in order to avoid imprisonment or death? What if he had crossed the ocean and joined the Puritans recently settled in New England?
Peter Ackroyd adopts this idea and from it creates an enthralling story of conflict, treachery, hypocrisy and greed.
Milton is shipwrecked and forced to wander through the American wilderness with a young companion, Goosequill, who assists him in his blindness. Yet this is only the beginning of his adventure. He encounters the native Indians and must learn to live beside them. He creates his own colony with a band of strict Puritans and at first all proceeds well. But when he is forced to confront Ralph Kempis, a settler who has established his own Roman Catholic town at nearby Mary Mount, events take a disastrous turn. And even John Milton himself cannot foresee the climax of his epic journey in the new land.
One of Peter Ackroyd's finest achievements, Milton in America is a brilliant and mysterious novel which takes the reader into an enchanted world that is part dream and part history, part invention and part truth.