The Loyalist: A Story of the American Revolution

Philadelphia, 1777. The British occupy the city, and in its grand houses, the war is fought not with muskets but with whispered loyalties and betrayed friendships. Peggy Shippen, daughter of a Loyalist family, and Marjorie Allison, whose heart beats for independence, have been close as sisters. Now they find themselves on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide. The novel opens amid the glittering pageantry of the Mischienia, a grand entertainment staged for General Howe, where Peggy moves easily through the British officers while Marjorie watches with quiet fury. What follows is a story of two women navigating a city torn between crowns and causes, their personal bond strained by the revolutionary fervor reshaping their world. Barrett renders the Revolution not as a distant political event but as something devastatingly intimate: the slow unraveling of relationships, the impossibility of neutrality, the way history demands choices that destroy old certainties. This is a quiet tragedy about what happens when revolution comes home, and it speaks to anyone who has watched political conviction tear apart the people they love.