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.