For the first time in six years, Jordan returns from California to Utah to visit his mother in jail. As a teenager he was expelled from his family and religious community, a secretive Mormon offshoot sect. Now his father has been found shot dead in front of his computer, and one of his many wives – Jordan’s mother – is accused of the crime. Over a century earlier, Ann Eliza Young, the nineteenth wife of Brigham Young, Prophet and Leader of the Mormon Church, tells the sensational story of how her own parents were drawn into plural marriage, and how she herself battled for her freedom and escaped her powerful husband, to lead a crusade to end polygamy in the United States.Bold, shocking and gripping, The 19th Wife expertly weaves together these two narratives, one historical, the other set in a fundamentalist breakaway sect of the Mormons that still practises plural marriage to this day. A page-turning literary mystery, it also shows how a society experiments with traditional family values at its peril, in an enthralling epic of love and faith.