Throughout the harsh New England winters the house they called Castle Ugly stood empty and dead. For a few months of the year only did it live: when the Courtlands came from New York to pick up the fragile threads of their summer life, to act out the play which for them, during those brief months, took the place of living. It was a gracious anachronism, that life; a survival of the good years; an ephemeral fantasy whose days were numbered now as the world collapsed towards war. But for two families the end of the game was even nearer than they could have guessed. In the close-knit circle that made up the summer population of South Harbor, none had been closer over the years than the Courtlands and the Ralstons. So it seemed both natural and inevitable that Sally Courtland and David Ralston, who had grown up together through the Long Island summers, should find their friendship drifting into love. They at least, it seemed, would have something valuable and lasting to show for those years. It would never have occured to them that their relationship was as artificial and brittle as the environment from which it sprang; still less that in the game their elders were now playing out to its end they were not even pawns, just unnoticed and unheeded accessories. When the blow came, it was a terrible one - a single night of senseless, grotesque, unimaginable violence that tore the heart out of the summer world, and changed for ever the lives of those who survived it... A very minor sign of bumping to top of spine and a tiny nick in the top edge of the back cover of the dj about an eighth of an inch in length.

Fiction Novel New England