On the night of December 16, 1773, rebels in Mohawk costumes dump forty-five tons of East India Company tea worth £10,000 into Boston harbour; so much of it floats on the surface that tea spills back over the gunwales of the British merchant ships and must be shovelled again from the decks into the water.The British Are Coming covers the subsequent sixteen months of escalating tension, including the Coercive Acts and the First Continental Congress. The book opens with Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, as beacon fires and signal guns draw armed rebels to battle "as if men came down from the clouds," in one witness's description. The narrative unspools: Ticonderoga; Bunker Hill; Washington, takes command at Cambridge, uniformed in a plumed hat and a purple sash; the failed assault on Quebec and the catastrophic retreat from Canada, with three thousand of the five thousand survivors suffering from smallpox, dysentery, and "putrid fever"; under bombardment, the British evacuate Boston; the Declaration; the British take Brooklyn, then Manhattan, then cross the Hudson to seize Fort Lee, where the garrison escapes so narrowly that pots are found boiling on camp fires and tables have been laid for supper in the officers' mess; Washington retreats across New Jersey; the naval battle on Lake Champlain; Washington attacks Trenton, and then Princeton, keeping alive the insurrection for another season. Rick Atkinson will tell this story in depth with emotional grip, to restore the tragic, human, two-sided quality that saturates the American saga from 1775 to 1781. This is a grand narrative, an epic that weaves together tactical combat scenes--marching the reader into battle--with strategic storytelling that illuminates the reasoning and anxieties of those making the decisions that shaped both a new nation and Western civilization. He marries the classical traditions of history with a voice that is fundamentally modernist, that is ironic and skeptical, while observing the most rigorous conventions of scholarship. With previously unused materials and extensive original research from the US as well as Germany, France and England, Rick Atkinson writes an epic narrative of this forgotten yet pivotal time in history.