Radicals

History remembers Victoria Woodhull as the first woman to run for president. It rarely remembers what her ambition cost her.

In nineteenth-century America, Victoria refuses the life prescribed for her. Spiritualist, newspaper publisher, Wall Street provocateur, and presidential candidate, she challenges the country’s most powerful institutions while navigating motherhood, scandal, and the punishing consequences of becoming a woman the world cannot ignore.

Nearly 150 years later, in rural Ohio, Avery is watching her own ambitions disappear. A struggling playwright caring for a mother whose memory is slipping away, she becomes consumed by Victoria’s unfinished story. But as the boundary between research and haunting begins to blur, Avery must confront what she has inherited and decide how much she is willing to sacrifice to reclaim her voice.

Moving between two women, two centuries, and one unfinished struggle, Radicals is a haunting, fiercely intelligent novel about ambition, caregiving, memory, and the women who refuse to be erased.