When Phyllis Dary unwillingly returned, after six years’ absence, to the isolated New England farm that was her home, she was instantly trapped in a dark whirlpool of forces beyond her understanding and beyond her control. Her brother Lloyd was at the station to meet her, and with him was a tall, straight figure in blue jeans — her mother, but a mother strangely altered. And her father, whose desperate appeal had brought her home, where was he? What was she to make of Lloyd's tight-lipped comments?
These were the outward signs that met her eyes and played upon her nerves. The deep maladies that underlay them were revealed slowly and too late. The father's paranoiac search for self-sufficiency had driven the owners of the hilltop farm fiercely back upon themselves. The Darys were at war with the world. So it was not surprising that, when another war broke out, announced by Japanese bombs falling on Pearl Harbor, Mrs. Dary saw it only as a new phase in that older war. Her enemies were still the neighboring farmers and townspeople, and their strategy now was the draft — their objective to take her son from her and have him killed. Outcasts in their own eyes, Lloyd and Phyllis struggled against the hostility of the neighborhood.
And then the time came when the brother and sister were completely alone on the farm.
Out of this tense, unnatural situation Clara Winston has written a haunting, completely convincing novel that will grip its readers by the tautness of its narrative and the purity and power of its style. A writer of major importance is here presented for the first time.
