The stoic

Frank Cowperwood, a Chicago financier, carries his ambitions across the Atlantic and into the heart of London. There he takes on the enormous job of building the city's underground railway, a project shaped by the real-life transit magnate Charles Yerkes.

The novel is the final part of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire, following The Financier and The Titan. Readers who have followed Cowperwood's rise through American finance will find his restless drive and appetite for power carried into a much older and more formal society.

Dreiser's book is aimed at adult readers interested in the workings of big business, the politics of public works, and the personal costs of ambition.