Thomas Tryon's new novel is in the spellbinding tradition of the two memorable best sellers that preceded it. And it is more. It is a novel suffused with nostalgia, as it recreates the texture of life in an American small town and brings back our own lost memories of the nineteen-thirties and forties. It is a heart-piercing evocation of a bittersweet alliance, with all its thorny ambiguities, between a charming woman and an adorning young boy. It holds the reader in a delicately taunting suspense as it gradually reveals the unimaginable truth about its lovely - and elusive- heroine. And above all, it gives us Lady. Lady- who lives in the imposing house on the other side of the Green. Lady- who is the special friend (or boom compenion, as Krazy kat would have it) of young Woody across the way. Lady- who is kind as she is fair, who helps, who cares, whom everybody loves. Lady- the lady of Pequot Landing, who reigns lightly over the town from the time of her young widowhood just after the First World War, through the twenties, through the Bust and the (dreaded) New Deal and the Great Hurricane of 38 and Pearl Harbor. Lady- who lives in agony with her terrible secret, until she no longer can; who deceives; who disappoints; who brings sorrow as intense as the joy she brought before. Lady- wonderful Lady- who is the heart and soul (and mystery) of this moving and compelling novel, the third consecutive triumph of storytelling from the author of the Other and Harvest Home.

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