Requiem for a Summer Cottage - Hardcover

Lockhart, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0870744763 ISBN 13: 9780870744761

Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr, 2002

Synopsis

Set on Maryland’s Eastern Shore during the 1970s and ’80s, Barbara Lockhart’s first novel tells the story of a family living on an isolated farm dealing with the ties of love and pain that bind and set them at odds. Justin, the father, is a divided self, shifting seemingly without cause from exuberance to gloom. His stoic wife, Rosemary, finds his moods incomprehensible, yet is seduced by his love of life and talent for risk-taking, characteristics she sees and prizes in their three children as well. As events spin increasingly out of control, Rosemary finds herself alone in the eye of the storm.

Using multiple viewpoints, Lockhart tracks the Williams family’s internal and external struggles in a rural environment, a landscape that often reflects the mood of family members caught in a precarious balance between the extremes of despair and hope. Lockhart’s novel is ultimately about the enduring web of family set against the mysteries of personality and fate.

About this title

From the Author:

With enjoyment and a little trepidation, Rosemary watches her husband, Justin, steer their speedboat in a zigzag down river as their children, Michael, Anne and Davey laugh at the boat’s wild ride. Their life, as epitomized by their summer cottage on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, if full of promise. But when Justin loses his job in Washington, D.C. and the family moves to a farm near the cottage, they not only find themselves living in isolation, but unwittingly at the center of a storm spawned by genetic design.

Clueless as she is at first to the reasons for Justin’s moods, Rosemary is also seduced by his love of life and his talent for risk taking. Yet he is a divided self, shifting between exuberance and vagaries, whose effect on the family is pervasive. It is when Justin leaves her, when her teenage children manifest signs that are all too familiar, when she is faced with sudden singularity and the heart’s longing that her epiphany and realization of love and self come about.

For Michael, the anchor bearer; Anne, the vulnerable; and Davey, the one who tries to leave the family, their father’s legacy follows them maddeningly and superbly as they live between impulse and choice. Overall, it is in the precarious balance between gain and loss, the paths crossed, and the inevitably of a fate expressed through metaphor after metaphor, that the story is told of the enduring web of family, the effects of its dissolution, its pride, lament, and love.

About the Author:

In 1997 BARBARA LOCKHART received an Individual Artist Award in Fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council for an early version of Requiem for a Summer Cottage. A graduate of the M.F.A. Program at Vermont College, she has had stories published in venues such as The Greensboro Review, Pleaides, Women’s Words, and Oceana Magazine. She grew up in New York City and now lives on a twenty-two acre nature preserve she’s planted with pines and dogwood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

About this edition

• Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0870744763
• ISBN 13: 9780870744761
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280