Kate Clephane has been away from her daughter for eighteen years. Divorced and living in modest exile on the French Riviera, she has spent nearly two decades nursing the wound of separation. When news arrives that her formidable mother-in-law has died, Kate sees a door crack open: perhaps now, at last, she can return to New York and reclaim the motherly role that was stolen from her. But time has done its work. Her daughter Anne has grown into a stranger, shaped by the very society that cast Kate out. This is Wharton at her most piercing, examining the unsentimental realities of motherhood, regret, and the impossibility of rewinding a life. There are no neat reconciliations here, no sentimental declarations. Instead, Wharton offers something more honest: a look at what it means to return to something you've destroyed, and the terrible possibility that love, too late, may be the cruelest gift of all.
