Please be aware orders placed now may not arrive in time for Christmas, please check delivery times.
Ceremony of the Innocent
One of this country's most acclaimed novelists returns to late nineteenth and early twentieth century America as the setting for her most personal novel: the parallel stories of a woman and a country and the loss of innocence. From a life of servitude in a small Pennsylvania town, Ellen Watson is catapulted into a life she was never prepared to live a life she never quite believes herself worthy of. As the bride of Jeremy Porter, scion of a wealthy eastern family, she enters into a world of politics, wealth, and power, a world where hypocrisy and ruthlessness reign. And against the background of a crumbling American Dream, as a nation comes fully of age and faces the First World War, Ellen loses the one man who can protect her ... and a country loses the man who perhaps could have saved it from the raw and brutal ambition of the sons of Cain.