PIERS WILLOUGHBY is an autobiographical novel that recounts the life of an innovative English architect through the latter half of the 19th century, with some emphasis on his intellectual and professional formation and development, influenced by the early Arts-and-Crafts movement and the architect George Truefitt, dedicated to breaking away from the prevailing architectonic classical- and gothic-revival traditions of the era in Britain and Imperial India. A casual shipboard encounter on his way to establish and direct, possibly, the first modern, design-based school of architecture in the world makes a fundamental change in his professional and domestic lifestyles and the resetting of his moral compass.