Crossing Eden is the story of an American family in the summer of 1929, when a failed businessman divides himself from his wife and children, and a troubled farm boy runs away from home in the company of a gangster. It's also the tale of a nation in the last months of the Roaring Twenties, a glittering decade of exuberance and doubt, optimism and fear. Set equally among the states along the Middle Border, in a small East Texas town, and in a great gleaming metropolis, Crossing Eden chronicles the Pendergast family of Farrington, Illinois, cast apart by circumstance into the early 20th century landscape of big business, tent shows, speakeasies, séances, bank robberies, lynchings, murder, romance, circuses, and skyscrapers. It's a grand tapestry of the American experience in an age of transition from rural to urban, with our nation perched on the precipice of the Great Depression.