The Heretic: A Novel

The story is a common one for late seventeenth-century Ireland: A servant girl named Sally is seduced by her master, Mr. Manley, and in nine months dies giving birth to her illegitimate daughter, Anne. But Anne's destiny is anything but common - she grows up to become Anne Bonny, the infamous cross-dressing pirate. Even from infancy, Anne differs from other children. She is raised by Annie Fulworth, a competent, practical woman bringing up six children on her own who nonetheless finds herself having to turn to old wives' tales of changelings to explain the inexplicable. As Anne grows, the real blurs with the fabulous, the natural with the unnatural, and the reader is transported from the rice plantations of America to the high seas of the West Indies.