With this novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, the author of "Eat, Prey, Love" and "Committed" returns to fiction. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker, a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in...