Edward makes a choice. Mary takes a vow.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Hacksaw Ridge in The Faithful Ones: A Novel, the poignant story of an Army recruit’s fidelity to his pacifist conscience at the cost of his freedom, and a naïve sister’s unwavering loyalty to the persecuted brother she refuses to let the world forget.

Aspiring sketch artist and pacifist-leaning Catholic, Edward reports for duty at Camp Crofton with a heavy heart. Weeks later, a principled stance on the bootcamp firing range lands him, bizarrely, in a barbaric Philadelphia state mental asylum called Byberry with no ticket out. His young, adoring sister Mary finds herself accompanying her mother on long treks from the city to visit her much-altered brother at the strange ‘hospital’ only to be left bereft and mystified when her pressing questions go unanswered.

While Mary grows up determined to solve the puzzle of her beloved brother’s unraveling, Edward struggles a world away to survive with his mind and humanity intact. Far from the theater of world war, Ed finds himself instead in the middle of a homegrown battle against institutional injustice, not with tanks and planes but principle and heart. Tormented by his nemesis, asylum attendant Buster Keating, Ed nears despair until he meets his alter ego in kindhearted hospital attendant and Quaker conscientious objector Walter Sinclair. With a handful of other earnest conscientious objectors, the men conspire to sneak out visual evidence of hospital atrocities to Life Magazine and blow the lid off the place—maybe even attract the attention and muscle of Mrs. Roosevelt. To do his part, Ed must rely on his faithful young visitor Mary to deliver his sketches to the parish priest, while keeping her innocent and in the dark.