A Dual Inheritance
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Autumn 1962: Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley meet in their final year at Harvard. Ed is far removed from Hugh's privileged upbringing as a Boston Brahmin, yet his drive and ambition outpace Hugh's ambivalence about his own life. These two young men form an unlikely friendship, bolstered by a fierce shared desire to transcend their circumstances. But in just a few short years, not only do their paths diverge-one rising on Wall Street, the other becoming a kind of global humanitarian-but their friendship ends abruptly, with only one of them understanding why.
Can a friendship define your view of the world? Spanning from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present-day stock market collapse, with locations as diverse as Dar es Salaam, Boston, Shenzhen, and Fishers Island, A Dual Inheritance asks this question, as it follows not only these two men, but the complicated women in their vastly different lives. And as Ed and Hugh grow further and further apart, they remain uniquely-even surprisingly-connected.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two college chums one an ambitious Jew, the other a privileged, guilt-burdened WASP who first meet in 1963 as Harvard seniors find their lives separating and intersecting around the same woman over many years, in Hershon's searing novel about class, ethnicity, and love (both platonic and romantic). Ed Cantrowitz is straight out of Dorchester, Mass., abrasive but winningly forthright; Hugh Shipley, heir to a valued name but decayed fortune, is deeply ambivalent about both his old-money connections and his own obvious charm; and Helen, Hugh's high school sweetheart, all forge a connection that defies conventional wisdom. Even though their intimacy comes to a nominal end early in their lives, for reasons known only to Helen and Ed, the impact of this connection echoes through decades, as each goes his or her separate way, living life, raising families, working in Africa, Haiti, or Wall Street, and, in one case, going to prison. The intensely detailed love triangle is reminiscent of an East Coast elite answer to the Midwestern trio of Freedom, but with mere keen observation in place of that other novel's sweeping moral pronouncements. Hershon (The German Bride) explores the ways we can, and can't, escape our backgrounds.
