Before Winston Churchill became Britain's wartime leader, he wrote this sweeping novel about a woman who refuses to be ordinary. Honora Leffingwell is born in Nice to a dashing consul father and beautiful American mother. When tragedy claims them both, she's shipped to St. Louis to live with her respectable but provincial Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary. But Honora knows she was meant for something larger than teas and social calls. She is striking, ambitious, and haunted by memories of a glamorous father who moved through world capitals with effortless charm. As she navigates the constraints of 1900s society, a chance meeting with the ambitious Peter Erwin ignites something in her. Churchill, writing before his political awakening, constructs a surprisingly nuanced portrait of a woman caught between the old world and the new, between duty and desire. The novel functions partly as roman à clef, drawing on Churchill's own transatlantic background and his glamorous American mother. For readers curious about the literary origins of one of history's most consequential leaders.
