In 1763, sixteen year old Jonathan Hardy flees England for the new world. Escaping unrelenting poverty and a possible future that led inexorably to the gallows, Jonathan arrives in pre-revolutionary Savannah, Georgia. Taking work on the large plantation owned by Owen and Sylvia Hart, Jonathan steps into a world of beauty and brutality, where he makes an enemy of the colony's most powerful man, Mr. Jarvis Best and is forced to flee for his life.

A sweeping story of love and revenge, friendship and betrayal. Mendelson sets The New World at the eve of the American Revolution when like Jonathan himself, the Colonies are fleeing English rules for a new world.