Book Description

In seventeenth-century England, loving the wrong person could put you in a hangman's noose... Noah Bancroft, banished and rejected after being caught in a compromising position, hopes for a fresh start in the new colonies, where no one knows his sins. But his bright future gets derailed when he can't keep his eyes off a handsome young native man named Jimmy Hawkey. After escaping from a cruel master, Noah finds refuge in a community of young men like himself led by the eccentric Thomas Morton. But after Captain Wollaston sells most of the indentured servants to Virginia, threatening the survival of the colony, Noah and the others force him out and establish an egalitarian society. Thomas Morton's merry and free-wheeling revels, plus the colony's fair treatment of their Native American neighbors, earn the rath of the Plymouth Puritans. When the vindictive preacher Jonathan Cheswick witnesses Noah with Jimmy, he and the Plymouth authorities move to suppress the "evil" in their midst. Will Noah ever be free to love and find happiness with Jimmy? Or will the Puritan authorities sacrifice him on the altar of their New Jerusalem? Read Of Wild and Merry Men to find out!