Shipwreck of Hopes

We Dream… But At What Cost Do We Dare Chase Our Hopes?

SHIPWRECK OF HOPES sweeps the reader from a desolate island beach in America, across the Atlantic to war-torn Italy to tell a story of shipwreck, deception, thievery, and murder on treacherous seas, in bloody revolution, and on an isolated shore.

Drawing inventively on the lives that converged with the fate of the ship Elizabeth in 1850, the novel goes beyond biography to reveal the harrowing journeys of those involved on that desperate day.

Prominent American writer MARGARET FULLER, haunted by the memory of a domineering father, leaves America for Europe. While in Rome, she delves into her passions and into the bloody Italian Revolution of 1848. Meanwhile, on a remote island east of New York, HANNAH OAKS wrestles with her own haunted past that leads her to marry a man who forces her into his string of crime, thievery and murder.

SHIPWRECK OF HOPES reconciles the famous and brilliant Margaret Fuller with the simple and humble Hannah Oaks, whose lives ultimately collide in an unexpected and heartbreaking way.

As the novel jump-cuts from Rome’s ravaged streets to New York’s rugged shore, place, time, memory and dream are woven together to tell the stories of MARGARET and HANNAH, who risk everything in their quests to take back their own lives.