Peregrine Hill (A Novel)

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair, a novel set in Gilded Age New York about a desperate mother and headstrong daughter navigating a world built on men’s appetites and women’s silence

At the dawn of the twentieth century, widow Isabelle Bishop still believes in love—but she knows only money can save her. After losing her husband and three of her children in a shipwreck, she has one chance to rescue what remains of her family: her daughter Mariah and her elderly mother. When Isabelle captures the attention of John Whitten, one of New York’s wealthiest men, she dares to hope that fortune might finally favor her.

But Whitten’s interest is not in Isabelle—it’s in eighteen-year-old Mariah, still reeling from a romantic but disastrous scandal. When Whitten discovers the secret mother and daughter have tried to keep buried, he uses it to his advantage, threatening to expose them unless Mariah accepts his proposal. For the sake of their survival, Isabelle makes a devil’s bargain: she will urge her daughter into a marriage she knows could destroy her.

Mariah quickly realizes her husband’s home is a gilded cage. Yet even under his watchful eye, she begins to carve out passions of her own, finding an unexpected ally in her ambitious maid, Hetty, and daring to imagine a life beyond her constricted world. Together, she and Hetty risk everything to claim a measure of power and self-determination in a world that denies them both.

From the glittering parlors of Gilded Age New York to the windswept cliffs of Rhode Island, Peregrine Hill is a novel in the tradition of Edith Wharton and the Brontë sisters, about unlikely love affairs and the impossible choices women have always been forced to make.