This is the driving, compassionate story of a young man's coming of age, a well-born rebel who defies his family's two hundred years of aristocratic tradition...and flees the horrors that churn beneath its tranquil surface.

Avery Hollister grew up admiring his father, loving his gentle mother too much, and believing in the aristocratic Hollister tradition. And then he sees his family as it really is. His father, a faithless bully, is anxious to preserve appearances at any cost, while his mother, suffering from lack of love, is slowly losing her mind.

So Avery makes a bitter break. He leaves the great New England mansion whose hidden tragedies threatened to ensnare him, and escapes to Manhattan, where he rooms with the son of an immigrant family and falls in love with an enchanting Greenwich Village woman... and through the pain and ecstasy, tears and laughter, begins to discover a whole new life that's unshackled from the past.

"Written with passionate conviction. Gorham is rapidly developing into a major American novelist." Indianapolis Times

"It is real and earnest without being woundingly ugly. Often you'll feel that you're reading a mid-century F. Scott Fitzgerald and that is only one of this book's pleasant virtues." Courier-Journal

"A penetrating novel," Philadelphia Inquirer

"Gorham has matured into a really important novelist. This book convinces me that, except for John P. Marquand, there is not a single master of fiction writing today who knows as much or writes as well about New England families." Knoxville Journal

"Gorham's novel is an ambitious one, containing some excellent writing." Kansas City Star

"An excellent example of the coming-of-age novel. Gorham writes with wit tempered by compassion." Greensboro News & Record