Set in Nauvoo, Illinois, she tells the story of a single family, a woman and her Mormon husband, loosely based on her in-laws' family history from the period and augmented by on-site research. The novel preceeded the first scholarly treatment of Nauvoo by three years.

As an outsider, Sorensen's protagonist is puzzled by the city's mysteries. Gradually, however, she discovers that a neighbor's obsession with the LDS prophet is due to her polygamous marriage to him. Even so, Mercy Baker cannot foresee the complications that her own baptism will bring.

Virginia Sorensen was born in 1912 in Provo, Utah. Subsequently christened Utah's First Lady of Letters, Sorensen wrote eight novels including A Little Lower than the Angels, On This Star, The Evening and the Morning, Many Heavens, Kingdom Come, and Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. She was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships that took her to Mexico and to Denmark. She also won an O. Henry award, the 1956 National Child Study Association Award for Plain Girl, and the Newbery Medal in 1957 for another children's book titled Miracles on Maple Hill. Yet she remained unappreciated at home until long after her fame faded elsewhere. She lived in Morocco with her second husband, British novelist Alec Waugh, from the 1950s until his death in 1981. She settled in Florida for her final decade and died in 1991.

Mary Lythgoe Bradford, M.A., English, University of Utah, is the author of Leaving Home: Personal Essays and Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian; editor of Personal Voices: A Celebration of Dialogue and of Mormon Women Speak; and a contributor to Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, A Thoughtful Faith, A Little Lower than the Angels, and A Time to Weep and a Time to Sing. She is a former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and her own articles have appeared in BYU Today, This People, The Deseret News, The Journal of Pastoral Counseling, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters, the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies (the Evans Award), and a recent "independent scholarship grant" from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies to research and write a biography of Virginia Sorensen.