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The Physician
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
In the 11th century, Rob Cole left poor, disease-ridden London to make his way across the land, hustling, juggling, peddling cures to the sick—and discovering the mystical ways of healing. It was on his travels that he found his own very real gift for healing—a gift that urged him on to become a doctor. So all consuming was his dream, that he made the perilous, unheard-of journey to Persia, to its Arab universities where he would undertake a transformation that would shape his destiny forever.

The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
Noah Gordon’s acclaimed trilogy, spanning one thousand years in the lives of one uncommonly gifted family
In The Physician, an orphan in eleventh-century London, Robert Cole, becomes a fast-talking swindler. As he matures, his strange gift—an acute sensitivity to impending death—never leaves him, and he yearns to become a healer. Arab madrassas are the only authentic medical schools, and he makes his perilous way to Persia. Christians are barred from Muslim schools, but by claiming he is a Jew, he studies under the world’s most renowned physician, Avicenna. Cole’s journey and love for a woman who must struggle against her only rival—medicine—make The Physician a riveting modern classic.
In Shaman, Dr. Robert Judson Cole, nineteenth-century descendent of the first Robert Cole, travels from his ravaged Scottish homeland, through the operating rooms of antebellum Boston, to the cabins of frontier Illinois. In the wilderness he befriends the starving remnants of the Sauk tribe, who have fled their reservation. In the process, he absorbs their culture and learns native remedies that enrich his classical medical education. He marries a remarkable settler woman he had saved from illness. The Cole family is drawn into the bloody vortex of the Civil War, and their determination to survive in the midst of wilderness and violence will stay with the reader long after the final page.
In Matters of Choice, Roberta Jeanne d’Arc Cole is the latest first-born descendant of Dr. Robert Cole. Favored to be named associate chief of medicine at a Boston hospital, she is married to a surgeon and owns a trophy residence in Cambridge as well as a summer house. But everything melts away. Her gender and her work at an abortion clinic cost her the hospital appointment. Her marriage fails. Crushed, she goes to her farmhouse in western Massachusetts, thinking to sell it, and finds an unexpected life. How she continues to fight for every woman’s right to choose, while acknowledging her own ticking clock and maternal yearning, makes this prize-winning third story of the Cole trilogy relevant and unforgettable.

Matters of Choice
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
A spirited and gifted physician forgoes a stellar career at a prestigious hospital for a small town private practice, and finds even greater challenges than those of the big city. Now she faces her hardest test as a doctor and a woman: whether to keep the medical secret of a girl who has desperately turned to her for help, or to betray that trust to keep the love of the man who has filled her life with unexpected joy....

The Rabbi
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
Michael Kind was a rabbi, but he was also a man. A man who couldn't help that his heart led him to Leslie, a beautiful minister's daughter. Defying parents and teachers, they dare to love one another and build a life together, in this sweeping drama of love and identity, compassion and crueltly, and a complicated world that will not accept their decisions....
"A rewarding reading experience."
LOS ANGELES TIMES

The Winemaker
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
From the author of The Physician and Shaman now comes this story of a young man—the grapes he grows, the wine he fashions, the women he loves, and his struggle against an evil that seeks to destroy him. Already an international bestseller.
Josep Alvarez is a young man in the tiny grape-growing village of Santa Eulália, in northern Spain, where his father grows black grapes that are turned into cheap vinegar. Joseph loves the agricultural life, but he is the second son, and his father’s vineyard will be inherited by his brother Donat, the firstborn. Josep needs to keep his hands in the soil. He yearns for a job growing grapes and for an opportunity to marry Teresa Gallego.
In Madrid, an assassination plot, conceived against the political leader of Spain by men of wealth and power, creates a storm of intrigue that sucks into its vortex a group of innocent young farm workers in Santa Eulália. How Josep’s life is changed drastically by these events, and how, ironically, they gradually turn him into an inspired vintner with an evolving vision of life, is the fascinating story of The Winemaker.

Shaman
Noah Gordon
Historical Fiction / Literature & Fiction
Robert Jeremy Cole, the legendary doctor and hero of The Physician, left an enduring legacy. From the 11th century on, the eldest son in each generation of the Cole family has borne the same first name and middle initial and many of these men have followed the medical profession. A few have been blessed with their ancestor's diagnostic skill and the "sixth sense" they call The Gift, the ability to know instinctively when death is impending. The tragedy of Rob J.'s life is the deafness of his son, Robert Jefferson Cole, who is called Shaman by everyone who knows him. Shaman's life is difficult. First, he must learn to speak so that he can take his place in the hearing world, and then he must fight against the prejudices of a society where physical differences matter. As Shaman struggles to achieve his identity, the Coles, along with the rest of America, are drawn into the conflict between the North and the South.