Early in his career, Robert J. Taylor was a hospital administrator. After several years overseas, he served as an advisor to the U.S. State Department, the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and other international aid agencies, working on assignments in over thirty countries. He’s authored three earlier books. His first, Hardship Post, an account of his years in Pakistan where he worked for the Aga Khan, won first place for memoir in the 2012 Royal Palm Literary Awards Competition. His second memoir, Memories Lost and Found: A Search for Family Heritage, was published in 2019. The Laws of Small Projects, a wise and witty series of essays on the meaning of life, was published in 2021. A native of Minneapolis, he currently lives in Colorado with his wife Susan.
Molly and the Spatterdasher
An Immigration Odyssey and Disaster at Sea ~ A Novel Inspired by Family Lore
by Robert J. Taylor
Molly and the Spatterdasher
An Immigration Odyssey and Disaster at Sea ~ A Novel Inspired by Family Lore
by Robert J. Taylor
Published Feb 22, 2023
192 Pages
Genre: FICTION / Romance / Action & Adventure
Book Details
Set in the mid-1800s, A Gripping Tale of Desperation, Disaster, and Determination
It’s 1844 in Swansea, a grimy industrial town in South Wales dominated by copper smelters. John Gibson, destitute and desperate, has just turned eighteen and he’s drunk, at the mercy of a recruiter who signs him to a twenty-year stint in the British Army. Sober, hungover, and frightened, he runs away, across the Bristol Channel to Tiverton, in Devonshire, England, where he changes his name to Taylor and is taken on as an apprentice to become a cordwainer, a shoemaker. He falls in love with Molly Lake, his boss’s comely, smart, and feisty seventeen-year-old daughter. The young couple marry and begin a family. But life is brutally harsh, and they make plans to immigrate to America. John travels ahead to find work and sends money for Molly and the children to join him. But mid-Atlantic, her ship is plagued by deadly disease and torn apart by a raging storm. A passing steamship sees the burning wreck and watches in horror as it sinks into the sea. They report all were lost.
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