This historical novel is a matriarch's remembrance of two oil industry families over three generations: In Pennsylvania, as the Civil War ends, oil industry pioneers fight to control the commodity, own the infrastructure and win the wealth; in the 1890s New York City of the Standard Oil barons, the second generation fights corruption and suffers romantic tragedy as the trade goes global; and, caught in the terrible horrors of World War I, the third generation learns what mature love--and oil--really mean to the emerging modern world. In lean, muscular prose and through relentless storytelling, the book (the first in a multivolume saga of oil's history) is a tour of the world's first oil producing regions, from Pennsylvania to Baku to Mesopotamia to Indonesia to Persia to Romania. It weaves hard fact with adventure, romance and melodrama to explore the metaphysical and stark cold truths about love, family, oil and our addiction to it.