Every Chapter, In Order

Holland, 1672 — a prisoner, a jailer's daughter, and a bulb worth more than gold, in thirty-three chapters.

The novel opens on a real historical atrocity — the 1672 lynching of the de Witt brothers — before settling into its gentler central story of Cornelius van Baerle's wrongful imprisonment and his patient quest to grow history's first black tulip. See the full overview page, or this site's piece on the real Dutch tulip culture behind the novel's central obsession.