Peregrine Hill
A Novel
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair comes a sweeping novel set in Gilded Age New York where a forced marriage, family secrets, and the fight for freedom collide in an unforgettable story about a desperate mother and headstrong daughter navigating a world built on men’s appetites and women’s silence.
“A luminous, entrancing novel...The Gilded Age springs to vivid life in these pages, but beware, for not all that glitters is gold.” —Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Molly the Maid series
At the dawn of the 20th 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 attempts to deny 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Money can buy a beautiful house, but for the women in this absorbing historical novel, it can’t buy much freedom. At the turn of the 20th century, widowed Isabelle Bishop is nearly broke when wealthy John Whitten offers her family a lifeline with a catch: He wants to marry Isabelle’s 18-year-old daughter, Mariah. What follows is far more than the story of a miserable marriage. Nina de Gramont (The Christie Affair) surrounds Mariah with women facing their own versions of the same problem, from her ambitious maid Hetty to wives and widows learning how little control they have over their lives. We loved watching these women find ingenious ways to push back, particularly as Mariah discovers that writing fiction gives her a power she never expected. There’s plenty of delicious period melodrama along the way, including blackmail, scandal, fortune tellers, and suspicious deaths. But what makes Peregrine Hill so satisfying is seeing its women decide for themselves what a good life might actually look like—and what they’re willing to risk to get it.
