"What went wrong? This is young Meredith's question as she steps into her family's fairy tale of ease and beauty. Why had her mother fled? Why had her uncle died?" "The Frasers move as in eras past, drifting with the seasons. Holidays are spent on a sheltered island off the coast of Maine, at a South Carolina shooting plantation, in Park Avenue drawing rooms. Through Meredith's eyes, we watch as her cousins Pearce and Felicity come of age in these sheltered haunts." "As Meredith enters into a fragile alliance with Felicity and a dangerous liaison with Pearce, ghosts from the past reassert themselves. Patterns of destruction repeat, cries for help go unanswered, muffled by manners and gentle beach breezes. When tragedy strikes, Meredith and her cousins must reconcile their vanishing world with their expanding dreams." "A haunting portrait of a family debilitated by wealth, Gatherings is the stunning debut of an eloquent new voice in American fiction."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved