Restoration Court

Professor Sophia Stuart, smart, sexy, and sassy, finds herself in competition for a prestigious academic appointment with her closest friend, a prospective lover, a nasty colleague, and one very strange little man. Over the course of a sometimes whacky, sometimes heart-wrenching semester, as she campaigns for the honor that would be the crowning achievement of her professional career, Sophia becomes swept up in the private war of wills between two powerful personalities for whom the university is a battleground and whose clash of incompatible ideologies masks a struggle for nothing less than the soul of higher education itself. In negotiating this contested space, bestrewn with obstacles and challenges, the failure to overcome any one of which could frustrate her aspirations toward fulfillment, Sophia must learn how to reconcile her fragile sense of personal integrity with professional ambition. Somehow in this world circumscribed by philosophy and faction, Sophia, a quick study and shrewd, must craft the means to that reconciliation; and somewhere in the midst of this turbulent landscape she must locate a calm refuge for the preservation of the self, a place with room enough in which tender heart, tireless mind, and boundless soul can find adequate scope for enriched expression. Restoration Court, the inaugural novel in the Winston University Series, offers an irreverent glimpse into one of the most deliriously dysfunctional institutions of higher learning ever imagined. But for anyone who has worked in higher education, nothing of extreme shading and artful distortion of the novel can hide the underlying and disturbing realities present in the fictional representation, unquiet but for the modesty of its truth.