Named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times, and a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower tells the story of—as The Atlantic’s brief review last summer put it—“the Pilgrims’ turbulent first fifty years in the New World, and how they set the stage for subsequent American history.” Mayflower presents a riveting narrative tale, and Philbrick brings a bracing (and sometimes bloody) revisionism to one of the nation’s most jealously guarded mythical episodes. “History is at its most potent when the lessons of yesterday flow naturally into today,” wrote Peter Preston in The Observer, in London. “Here, brilliantly constructed, is a river of resonance. We have warlords and constantly shifting alliances, treachery, bribery, bungling. We have religious extremism, racial hatred, military carnage and cover-ups. This could be Afghanistan or Iraq, as bloodily relevant as the latest roadside bomb. Instead, across four centuries, Nathaniel Philbrick offers us the New England of the Mayflower pilgrims, the benign myths that helped shape modern America and what really happened.” Mayflower is both an epic yarn and a touchstone for conversation about America’s origins.