In January 1848 John Augustus Sutter, ‘the first American millionaire’ was ruined by one blow of a pickaxe. That blow revealed gold in one of the streams in Sutter’s Californian estate, triggering the Gold Rush that brought hordes of greedy miners from every corner of the world to Sutter’s vast domain.

Cendrars spent fifteen years translating Sutter’s life-story into fiction, departing (often radically) from the known historical facts to reshape the story of one of the great American pioneers with the pure gold of his own imagination. Published in 1924, Gold is a work of breathless pace, fantastic humour and soaring invention: an extraordinary story extraordinarily told. In 1936 Cendrars went to Hollywood to work on the movie version, Sutter’s Gold.

"Cendrars winds the history of Europe, the Spanish Empire and the United States around his hero like a cloak of flames that throw a light on a terrifying history . . . The brevity of Gold is deceptive; its language is the work of a poet who can conjure up the world and its bewildering people in a paragraph." New York Times Book Review