Born in 1800, Alma, an heiress, has an insatiable need to understand the hidden mechanisms behind all life itself. But as Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man who draws her in the opposite direction-into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma stands at an extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas.