Twenty-One Bells

Twenty-one missions. Twenty-one voices. One road.

In 1769 a small, limping Franciscan raised a cross on a hill above San Diego Bay. Over the next fifty-four years, twenty-one missions rose along the California coast, from San Diego to Sonoma, and with them came faith and music, hunger and plague, uprisings and miracles, and the transformation of a land and its peoples forever.

Twenty-One Bells tells that story through the voices of those who lived it: a leather-jacket soldier burying the dead at San Diego, Serra’s closest friend at his deathbed, a Tongva healer who helped lead a revolt, a Chumash basket weaver, a Mutsun boy who taught a friar his language, a Luiseño scholar dying far from home in Rome, and the old general who watched California pass from Spain to Mexico to the United States.

Historical fiction grounded in the record, with “A Note on the History” after every chapter separating what is documented from what is imagined: the story of the California missions told whole, not only the beautiful parts.