1928. Mexico. A lynching. A young Mormon, Cole Wilson, flees Chihuahua after witnessing a violence that shatters his faith and leaves him burdened by moral debt. He arrives in Prohibition-era New York seeking honest work and finds himself immersed in the crime, speakeasies, and social upheaval of the Jazz Age. To briefly escape it all he learns to fly, soaring above the city, a skill that carries into the skies over Spain and the Himalayas. At a Greenwich Village zendo led by a Japanese Zen master, Cole meets Della, an artist born to privilege and is invited into the world of her wealthy relatives, Aunt Lisa and Uncle Fitzhugh. Their unlikely love is tested as Cole’s conscience draws him into dangerous acts of penance involving unions, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. The love between Cole and Della is a relationship tested through the years by Cole's demons. As history darkens, friends are scattered across the globe, with Anne, a Buddhist woman, making a devastating choice to save her lover, Jack. Another friend, Ramsey Lawrence, runs parallel to Cole's struggle. He seeks peace rather than penance, moving from Japanese Zen monasteries to Indian ashrams and Christian monasteries in rural Kentucky. Their paths reflect two ways of confronting suffering in a violent century. Framed by a 1979 interview of Cole as an old man in the deserts of Chihuahua, Redemption is a sweeping historical novel of love and war, spiritual reckoning, and the long echo of moral choices made in youth.