Upon publication in 1993 it received wide attention particularly from other novelists such as Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and William Gibson, and has been translated into Italian, Japanese and other languages.

Erickson focuses on the period Jefferson spent in France at the beginning of the French Revolution (in one of the climactic scenes of the first part there is a nightmarish description of the storming of the Bastille).

In a departure from factual history, Hemings travels West, reaching a territory where Native Americans have never seen black or white people.

There, in a room where a murder has taken place, Sally wakes in an alternate present when the United States have disappeared; the action is set in Aeonopolis, a strange city under harsh theocratic rule and built near a volcano on the West Coast of North-America (though there is no overt indication about the exact position of the city).

Sally meets an Afro-American police detective named Wade who sets her free because he doesn't believe she is guilty of the murder, though the priests want her prosecuted.