Wickett's Remedy

From the author of the bestselling Bee Season, the magnificently imagined story of a winning young Irish American heroine's determined progress through an all but forgotten historical tragedy--Boston during the 1918 influenza epidemic. First time in paperback.

Lydia Kilkenny is eager to move beyond her South Boston childhood, and when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy Boston Brahmin who plans to become a doctor, her future seems assured. That path changes when Henry abandons his medical studies and enlists Lydia to help him invent a mail-order medicine called Wickett's Remedy. Then the 1918 influenza epidemic sweeps through Boston, and in a world turned upside down Lydia must forge her own path through the tragedy unfolding around her. As she secures work as a nurse at a curious island medical station conducting human research into the disease, Henry's former business partner steals the formula for Wickett's Remedy to create for himself a new future, trying-and almost succeeding-to erase the past he is leaving behind.

Alive with narrative ingenuity, and tinged with humor as well as sorrow, this inspired recreation of a forgotten era powerfully reminds us how much individual voices matter-in history and in life.