“Rachel Urquhart paints a fascinating, complex portrait of Shaker culture in early America. An unexpected coming-of-age story, a suspenseful mystery. But what makes The Visionist particularly engaging is its thoughtful examination of the nature of good and evil, and our struggle to recognize it in ourselves and in others.”— EOWYN IVEY, author of The Snow Child

“The Visionist is both a haunting, beautifully imagined tale of lives devastated by cruelty and transformed by love, and a gorgeously evocative portrait of an 1840s Shaker settlement that is as startling as it is convincing.”— CATHY MARIE BUCHANAN, author of The Painted Girls

About the Author:

Though she has split her life (and her personality) living on a farm in Massachusetts and in an apartment in New York City, Rachel Urquhart was born in Manhattan and, at the ripe old age of 40, moved to Brooklyn. Since everyone in her new neighborhood had children and dogs and held close the fantasy of someday publishing a novel, she fit right in. She was fortunate enough to begin her magazine career at Spy—a job so singular that it would prove to ruin her desire to ever want to work full-time anywhere else. Lucky for her, Vogue stepped in and saved her from herself. She has spent her entire adult life as a writer, contributing pieces and the occasional snippet of fiction to a variety of publications, including Spy, Vogue, Allure, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Tin House, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Vanity Fair, Women’s Times and The Reader. She has also written three “lifestyle” books for the ChicSimple series (Knopf), and worked as an editor, at Vogue and, more recently, in service of college-bound teenagers and people in need of a decent toast. It took an abnormally long time for her to begin—and then complete—The Visionist, her first novel, and her heart goes out to anyone who finds him or herself in a similar predicament. She received her M.F.A. in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and lives with her husband, two sons, two dogs and two cats.