"Barbara Lockhart's novel strikingly captures the dual qualities of
togetherness and distance, granting us entry into the minds of the
members of this family with a lyricism of inwardness and approach
that is reminiscent of To the Lighthouse. Adding gravity and lustre
to this saga is the scourge of manic-depression afflicting the father,
lurking within his children like fever. A magnificent work of
fiction, its humanity as penetrating as its
language."—Christopher Noël
	
     Set on Maryland's Eastern Shore during the 1970s and '80s,
Barbara Lockhart's moving 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 entrapment and
growth, despair and hope. Lockhart's novel is ultimately about the
enduring web of family set against the mysteries of personality 
and fate.

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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.