In 1889 two young girls left the relative security of their convent boarding school in Dublin to embark on a journey into the unknown. The diaries they kept of that journey and their new lives as Dominican nuns forms the basis of this book. A riveting read.

0he American pursuit of cleanliness has often been described as a national obsession. Hoy traces how Americans became this way. She stresses the influence of women, the recognition of the need to fight disease, and the way cleanliness became an American middle class obsession in the late 19th and 20th centuries.