Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author John M. Barry has penned numerous works on a variety of historical subjects. Here Barry explores the development of the fundamental ideas of church and state through the story of Roger Williams. The first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, Williams helped shape the balance of religion and politics seen in America today.
The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries...
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