Preston Wiley is a spoiled rich kid with a boathouse and a sailing yacht. But amid the outrageous parties and fast-paced life of his senior year, he awakes into a new world of ideas and free expression and is forced to choose between the opposing viewpoints of two powerful mentors. Teachers are not supposed to have feelings and opinions. But Laird Hardin is a thirty-three-year-old ex-fighter jock who is struggling at the breaking point in his self-sacrificial roles of father, teacher, and husband. From deep within the throes of a midlife crisis, he tries to reignite his youth with drugs, prostitutes, and ultimately with the most forbidden fruit of all. Meanwhile, Gavin McBride is a former Peace Corps worker who is just settling into his first stateside teaching position. Gavin is a twenty-six-year-old antitheist on a mission to save the world with a series of YouTube monologues that take on the government and organized religion. But when he offends his community's political and religious elite, powerful forces align against him. What Gods Would Be Theirs? is a literary novel that takes place on the northern shore of Lake Travis in a wealthy suburb of Austin, Texas. It is a fast-moving story about love, loss, the human appetite, and the search for meaning in a chaotic world.