(In the tradition of Philippa Gregory's smart, transporting fiction comes this tale of two independent, spirited sisters. Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by a father who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautiful and reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in their small English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father has trained her in the physician's art, an education forbidden to women. But Hannah's secret serves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunite with May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after a series of sexual misadventures had ruined her marriage prospects in England. As Hannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herself falling in love with her brother-in-law, even as she struggles to believe his claim that her sister died in childbirth. Alone in a wild, uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah is freed from the constraints of the society that judged both her and May and found them dangeroustoo smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life. But Hannah is also plagued by doubt, as her quest for answers to May's fate grows ever more disturbing and tangled. The Vanishing Point is a marvelously assured period piece. Sharratt's ten years of research on everything from seventeenth-century pharmacology to pioneer cooking are evident on each page. In this gripping, evocative novel, rich in texture and authenticity, Sharratt brings to vivid life a distant world that feels as immediate and relevant as our own.

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