The Mormon Prophet

Late 19th century America: a time when new religions rise in the margins, and ordinary families find themselves torn apart by conviction. The Croom household is such a place. Ephraim, a studious young man of rational mind, watches with growing unease as his mother's devotion to the newly formed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consumes her. Joseph Smith's movement has reached their door, and with it comes the terrible mathematics of faith: how much belief costs, and who pays it. Into this charged home comes Susannah, Ephraim's beautiful and impetuous niece, whose arrival unsettles the family's fragile equilibrium further. As Ephraim's skepticism collides with his mother's absolute certainty, the novel explores what happens when private devotion becomes public spectacle, and when the search for truth shades into something darker. This is a Victorian novel unafraid to examine the machinery of religious conviction from the outside looking in, asking quietly: what do we lose when we gain certainty?