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A Novel
by Nina de Gramont
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 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.
"In Peregrine Hill, the velvet curtain of the Gilded Age lifts on a society governed by wealth, reputation, and quiet coercion—a world where power belongs to men and survival demands ingenuity. Bold, atmospheric, and impossible to put down, the novel is historical fiction with real teeth. At its heart lies a deeply felt story of mothers and daughters navigating love, ambition, and survival in a world that offers them precious few good choices." —Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Little Monsters and Wild Game
"Sentence by sentence, Peregrine Hill is one of the most beautiful books ever written... This brilliant book is precise and maternal and militant. It loves human behavior— good and bad—and sees right through to our big, broken and duplicitous hearts. A genuine triumph of a novel." —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and The City Is a Rising Tide
This information about Peregrine Hill was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nina de Gramont is the author of The Christie Affair, which was a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, as well as the novels Gossip of the Starlings and The Last September. Nina teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
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