Leaving Bayberry House
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Two sisters, Liz and Angie, meet at their deceased parents country house to prepare it for sale. The sisters have never been close, but both are besieged by memories of their childhood and their parents. They are haunted by this house, where their father, a pacifist Unitarian minister, committed suicide. In the end, the sisters reconcile with each other and with the past. The novel takes place during one week in August 1973, when the sisters are middle-aged, but each chapter ends in a flashback to the years of World War II, when they were adolescents and the family was in turmoil, the father wrestling with his conscience over his pacifism and an affair with a Polish refugee, a son killed in the war, and one daughter sinking into bipolar disorder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two sisters revisit wartime tragedy while closing the family's summer house in McLaughlin's inert sixth novel (after Maiden Voyage). Set in 1973, the novel drags along over the course of one August week as the Carlson sisters, now in their mid-40s, pack up the family house in preparation for its sale. Angie, a potter and mother of two living in Ann Arbor, Mich., has not visited the house in the 28 years since discovering their minister father, depressed by events of WWII, hanging dead in the basement. Her older sister, Liz, a Farsi translator for the State Department, is on her second rocky marriage, living in New York, and worried that asking Angie to help with the house might trigger another mental breakdown. Gradually, the two open up, assisted and hindered by the visit of their sharp-tongued aunt and the surprise arrival of Angie's 18-year-old daughter and her hippie friends. McLaughlin injects some texture with WWII-era flashbacks, but the long-winded, dawdling narrative has little to recommend it.
