Author Description

As World War II sweeps the children of the prominent Schofield family of Washburn, Ohio, into adulthood, their mother, Agnes, discovers that she is a tourist in her own life. Widowed years before by her husband Warren's mysterious death in an icy morning car crash, Agnes no longer knows how to define herself. She is a wife with no husband, and a mother whose children no longer need her. But the war is ending, and the dispersed members of the clan make their way home: the beautiful Betts, the long-inseparable Dwight and Claytor, and Agnes's youngest child, Howard. Now grown up, they have all returned full of their own lives. Agnes's unspoken feelings of devotion as well as resentment - toward her children, toward her dead husband - create a palpable tension as she struggles to find the truth among the competing histories. Accustoming herself once more to her children's presence proves to be a less easy task than Agnes anticipated. In an era when few women exercise their autonomy, Agnes herself and her children and the friends who have known her all her life are startled to realize that she has become a woman of determined, perhaps selfish, independence. Even in her secret affair with Will Dameron, a man she might once have loved, Agnes discovers it is her self-reliance that she values most.