Beheld
From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts―and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core.
Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.
With gripping, immersive details and exquisite prose, TaraShea Nesbit reframes the story of the pilgrims in the voices of two women of very different status and means. She evokes a vivid, ominous Plymouth, populated by famous and unknown characters alike, each with conflicting desires and questionable behavior.
Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations―personal and political―that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed―and subsequently, who gets punished?
Best Reviewed Book of the Week ―Bookmarks
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Most Anticipated Books of 2020 ― Vogue, Medium, LitHub
“There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly … The novel is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot ― to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing ― that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.” – New York Times
“A compelling new novel by TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos, explores not only the dangers the first colonists confronted on arrival, but those they brought with them … Beheld disrupts expectation to render the pulsing messy lives of those too often calcified in myth.” – USA Today
“In this plain-spoken and lovingly detailed historical novel, the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony is refracted through the prism of female characters. Despite the novel’s quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone.” – New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Was the Early U.S. All that Puritanical? A Novelist Investigates.” Publisher’s Weekly, Nov. 22, 2019.
“In a gripping retelling of the Plymouth colony’s first murder, we finally hear the voices of women–and they speak an unvarnished truth that turns history on its pointy-hatted head. Truly a riveting read.” – Helen Simonson, author of MAJOR PETTIGREW’S LAST STAND and THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR
“TaraShea Nesbit’s puritans are passionate and vengeful and entrancing. Part mystery, part love story, beautifully told and meticulously researched, Beheld reanimates and complicates the mythologies of America’s earliest settlers. I was sad when it ended.” – Anton DiSclafani, author of THE YONAHLOSSEE RIDING CAMP FOR GIRLS
“Beheld breathes fresh life into a world grown still and murky beneath the scrim of legend–rife with intrigue, fractured by difference, marked by violence, and full of haunting images. With gorgeous, period-inflected prose, Nesbit takes us back to the earliest days of New England to look through the eyes and over the shoulders of historical characters both remembered and not. I read it at a gallop. What a marvel this novel is.” – Laird Hunt, author of IN THE HOUSE IN THE DARK OF THE WOODS
“Nesbit . . . cleverly recasts pilgrim history in this deeply enjoyable novel . . . Capturing the alternating voices of the haves (the Bradfords, Newcomen) and the have-nots (the Billingtons), Nesbit’s lush prose adds texture to stories of the colony’s women, and her deep immersion in primary sources adds complexity to the historical record.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review
“. . . the novel is a gripping read propelled by vibrant characterization, and an engrossing take on the Plymouth colony and America’s first murder.” – Historical Novel Society
“I read TaraShea Nesbit’s Beheld months ago, and it’s one of those novels that has stayed with me ― in the best way.” – Tina Jordan, New York Times Book Review Deputy Editor via Twitter
“Restoring women’s voices, primarily through Alice and Eleanor, adds a new and welcome dimension to our history, made more vivid by solid research and clear, concise prose. In Nesbit’s hands, history once again comes alive.” – Booklist
“Nesbit brilliantly captures the wrath between the classes and the irony of coming to a country in pursuit of religious freedom only to have the sanctimonious Puritans circumscribe the rights of the Anglicans.” – Publishers Weekly
“Nesbit’s novel has all the juicy sex, lies, and violence of a prestige Netflix drama and shines surprising light on the earliest years of America, massive warts and all. A dramatic look at the Pilgrims as seen through women’s eyes.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Nesbit tells this story of conflict and contradiction in alternating chapters from both the empowered and the powerless. The voices of the women are especially strong, particularly Elizabeth, whose friendships and reminiscences of the colony’s earlier days offer insight about the women of the plantation … Land ownership, religious observation and differing accounts of events all play their part in this clever, insightful novel that digs deeply into our country’s conflicted origins.” – BookPage
“. . . get ready for what the ladies of Plymouth have to say.” – Paperback Paris
“Nesbit’s empathy is as evident and important here as her commitment to accuracy. She conveys the ever-present threat of loss in seventeenth-century Plymouth … Reading historical fiction with a balanced combination of accuracy and emotion can approach reading a letter or a diary from the time. Such fiction can also offer intentional, carefully crafted drama and, in Nesbit’s case, beautiful prose.” – Fiction Writers Review