Imaginary Brightness (Durant Family Saga #1)

"History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes in an atmosphere of imaginary brightness." James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans.

With characters meticulously researched from the pages of America’s post-civil war history, Sheila Myers weaves fact and fiction to vividly re-imagine the lives of the people who built this country’s infrastructure and pioneered the American wilderness. This first book of the Durant family saga tells the story of William West Durant and his sister Ella, the children of the powerful American industrialist and railroad tycoon Dr. Thomas C. Durant. William and Ella find their fortunes and reputations threatened by their father’s questionable business dealings. While the family’s fortune teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, both brother and sister are whisked from their privileged lifestyle in high society London to the untamed Adirondack forests, where the tension between passion and propriety, their future and their family, turn their worlds upside down. Imaginary Brightness explores the early conquest of the great north woods, eavesdrops on America’s robber barons from the supper clubs of Manhattan, and unravels the mystery of William West Durant’s secret passions and conflicting loyalties.