Leaving Bayberry House

Two sisters, Liz and Angie, meet at their deceased parents’ country house in Massachusetts to prepare it for sale. The sisters have different lifestyles and are not close: Liz, the older sister, is a Farsi translator who travels often to the Middle East, while Angie is a potter married to a professor and has two teenaged children. They are besieged by memories in the house, where their father, a charismatic Unitarian minister, committed suicide. Angie, who was in the house at the time, has not returned in the twenty-eight years since it happened. She suffered a breakdown and Liz worries that her illness could return.

The novel spans the week the sisters are in the house together. Both women evade revealing their current problems: Angie is worried about her daughter, who lives in a commune, and Liz is worried about her marriage, since her husband has threatened divorce. As the week goes on the sisters talk openly and begin to build trust. The crisis comes when the daughter, two hippie friends, and an elderly, judgmental aunt shelter in the house during a storm.

The parallel story concerns the father’s decline during World War ll and its affect on the sisters. As a pacifist, he anguishes over the horrors of the war, has an affair, and is voted out of his church. Deeply depressed by the death of his son, who is killed in action, by his wife’s death from cancer, and by the news of Hiroshima, he takes his life. The sisters confront this event together finally in the place where it happened, and although their own problems remain unsolved, they feel a new love and support for each other.
224 pages, $14.95, ISBN: 978-1-56474-495-1

Review Highlights

Nobody writes about fractured families more perceptively than Ann L. McLaughlin.
–Kate Blackwell, you won’t remember this

In Leaving Bayberry House, McLaughlin has rendered a story of such exquisite tension and tenderness that upon reaching the final page I felt I had experienced not so much a book as a gift. With ingenious skill, she takes us back and forth in time between the eras of Watergate and World War ll and between the interior lives of two estranged sisters who reunite to prepare the family home for sale. What unfolds in every room, in every delicate exchange, are revelations of love and betrayal, memories and secrets long embedded and, above all, the enduring bonds of family. McLaughlin reminds us of the power of fiction to tell us the truth about the quiet ways we hurt and heal and the human instinct for recovery and joy. A beautiful achievement, a gem of a novel.
–Martin Moran, The Tricky Part

Ordering Information

Leaving Bayberry House is available at good bookstores everywhere. It can also be ordered through John Daniel & Co. by calling 800-662-8351.