Danny Conroy grows up in The Dutch House, a lavish folly in small-town Pennsylvania. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve with her wall of black hair, her delicacy, her brilliance. Their childhood is played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Andrea’s advent to The Dutch House will exact a banishment: a banishment whose reverberations will echo for half a century. As decades pass, Danny and his sister are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own enforced exile is that of their mother’s self-imposed one: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.
