The Wind That Shakes the Corn

What would you give-up to find genuine love?

On her wedding night, in eighteenth-century Ireland, English soldiers abduct Nell Dugan from the arms of her beloved Scottish husband and throw her on a ship, slave-fodder for a West Indies sugar plantation. There, she uses her beauty and cunning to seduce the plantation owner's stoic son who sneaks her away to pre-revolutionary Philadelphia where she agrees to marry him, believing her Scottish husband to be dead, and swearing to pay back the English not only for her own kidnapping but also for her mother's hanging by the Crown two decades earlier.

Nell Dugan's hatred for the English Crown is indigenous to the eighteenth century Irish, both Protestant and Catholic, who bring to Revolutionary America their age-old grudges against centuries of domination. The war in America is won, but after a lifetime of evening scores, love is lost for Nell--until a suspicious child and a miraculous cave in the wilderness of the Mississippi Territory, lead her to find love in the unlovable, and grace in the sufferings of a complex world. 

This is an advanced reader’s copy, uncorrected page proof, any material quoted should be checked against the final book.