In the wilds of 17th-century Connecticut, a band of Puritan refugees seek to build a new Jerusalem in the untamed wilderness. Mark Heathcote leads his family to the Naugatuck Valley, where they must confront not only the brutal demands of frontier living but also the shadow of the native peoples who call this land home. When tragedy strikes and his daughter vanishes into the forest, Mark faces a harrowing choice: retreat to the safety of settled towns, or venture deeper into the unknown to reclaim what he's lost. Cooper weaves a tale where faith is tested against violence, civilization clashes with the wild, and the very act of building a home becomes a battle for the soul. The novel probes what happens when God-fearing people discover the limits of their piety in a land that obeys no laws but nature's own. This was Cooper's audacious experiment in creating a distinctly American epic, mining the Puritan migration and frontier violence that had only recently passed into history.
