Twelve letters that tell one story, and then it ends.
In 1832 a field collector called Josiah Rook sets out across America to gather the plates for the book he hopes will finally carry his name. Every month he writes to Clara Vandegrift, the woman he is courting, whose father refused him and named one condition instead.
She gets the letters, one a month, in the order he wrote them. Twelve chapters, an ending that lands in the twelfth, and twelve plates kept.
Josiah and Clara are invented. The birds, the road and the year are not.
