Skip to Main Content

Bittersweet Manor

A Novel

Published by She Writes Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

About The Book

After a four-month estrangement from her family, thirty-two-year-old Emma Michaels visits The Harbor View Assisted Living Home to tell her grandmother, Gussie, that she has made a decision: she’s going to sell the family property—her inheritance. Sitting on the dock of Poquatuck Village, Connecticut, looking across the harbor to their family’s longtime home, the two women debate over Emma’s choice—and their conversation lays the framework for the book, which flows over the decades, all the way back to Gussie's youth and marriage, then forward through the lives of her three children, Auggie, Livy, and Alyssa, whose hopes and talents are warped by their mother’s influence and disappointed expectations. Expectations passed down through the generations. Subtle. Unspoken. Implacable. As Emma and Gussie remember the choices and dynamics that have produced the complicated tapestry that is their family’s history, Emma makes a number of surprising discoveries about her loved ones—and herself—and she prepares to do what no one else in her family has dared: let go of the past to make room for the future, though doing so will destroy the thing her grandmother holds most dear.

About The Author

Tory McCagg earned a M.F.A. from Emerson College's writing program in 1989; her thesis and novel Shards won the Graduate Dean's Award. She divides her time between Rhode Island and New Hampshire. You can see and read more about her at her website www.torymccagg.com or her blog www.darwinsview.com.

Product Details

  • Publisher: She Writes Press (May 6, 2014)
  • Length: 358 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781938314575

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

Bittersweet Manor is the perfect title for this book—a knowing multi-generational (not quite saga so much as) situation: a condition of privilege dealt with in differing ways by members of a family whose intimate wrangles are brilliantly limned. McCagg has an excellent ear, a noticing eye, and a deep familiarity with the world she here portrays. Read on!”
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of The Art of Youth, and Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English, The University of Michigan

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images