Broken Barriers

In 1914, a young woman discovers that falling from grace takes only a moment, but climbing back up is another story entirely. Grace Durland has lived her whole life in the velvet cage of wealth, where marriage is a transaction and love is a luxury. When her father's fortune collapses overnight, she's thrust into a world where a woman's worth is measured in dollars, not diamonds. Then she meets Ward Trenton, and everything she thought she knew about herself crumbles. He's married. He can't leave his wife. And yet the heart wants what it wants, indifferent to propriety or consequence. The novel follows Grace through the social ruin of her choices, the cold shoulders of former friends, and the cruel mathematics of an era when divorce was nearly impossible and a woman alone was a woman forgotten. An accident, as these things go, becomes both catastrophe and catharsis. Nicholson writes with sharp eye for the hypocrisies of his Gilded Age, for the way society punishes women for the same desires it excuses in men. The book endures because it asks the question that still echoes: what do we owe ourselves when the world demands we owe everyone else first?