Old California collides with the Industrial Age when twenty-year-old Mexican Irish mestiza Marisol Griffin inherits a failing rancho after the death of her grandmother, a legendary healer. To save her rancho, Mari forms an unlikely alliance of women – including an elite socialite and an escaped Chinese slave – and takes on the robber barons transforming San Francisco into a Gilded Age empire. Their fight draws them into the dangerous underbelly of the city, where financial fraud, trade in opium and slaves, and unchecked ambition threaten everything they love. 

 

A wrenching family drama of addiction and betrayal, this literary page-turner thrusts readers into the maelstrom of immigration, new technologies, environmental destruction, and unbridled greed that continues to roil lives today. Inspired by Juana Briones, Leland Stanford, William Ralston, Tien Fuh Wu, and Ah Toy, among others, Bay Lands is a sweeping story of women, land, and resistance at the birth of modern California.