Publisher's Synopsis
After a fatal epidemic, a young Colette Stonethrower flees her village to a life as an orphanage guardian, until another tragedy changes everything. As she leaves again on faith migrating far from the place of her birth, she meets a talented, idealistic stranger and makes a friend from a foreign land that becomes her trusted confidant. While her new life reveals her purpose; fighting for the working poor, the destitute, exposing corruption and advocating for the arts, she encounters the merciless genesis of urban industrialization that marks the American era of factory labor and machination. She also witnesses the beginnings of an artistic renaissance, forbidden love, the outbreak of World War I, and encounters the blossoming of a love like no other. Yet despite her struggles and some good fortune, she's also inheritor of something that will endure the generations. Set during the beginning of the last century, written lyrically-in prose sometimes like a delicate poem or an impressionist narrative, with surprising characters that enter and exit as in a dream, this is a novel to sense and savor.
