On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Paperback)

'Despite the comings and goings of literary fashion, not much of real importance has changed since Horace said that our stories should aim to instruct and delight. Beginning with ELLEN FOSTER, Kaye Gibbons has achieved both on every page. And she does it again here, strikingly, in a novel abut the bright habits of mind required for survival - and the high price paid for living on' Charles Frazier, author of COLD MOUNTAIN 'Gibbons has wrought a balanced and highly accessible novel...well constructed and provocative' THE TIMES 'Gibbons writes with confidence and imagination about personalities and a time which she has made her own.' TLS 'If there is a writer worthy to nominated the literary heir of Eudora Welty, Gibbons is that writer.' IRISH TIMES

A child living on a large plantation in 19th-century USA witnesses and deplores her wealthy father's cruelty towards his negro servants. Later in life she moves away to marry, but her family's lives are disrupted by the Civil War. In this absorbing novel the author writes about racial injustice and family relationships with humanity and insight. (Kirkus UK)

Gibbons's first outing after anointment by Oprah is a Civil War tale that's historically researched to a fault but psychologically the stuff of melodrama. On what may be the last day of her life, Emma Garnet Lowell, nee Tate, sets out to tell all, from childhood in tidewater Virginia (where she was born in 1830) through marriage, childbirth, the war itself, widowhood, and old age. Everything about the telling in setting and in people is writ large. Of characters who are bad, central and most horrendous by far is Emma's father, Samuel Tate, a crude, tyrannical, pro-slavery plantation owner who's raised himself from nothing, kills one of his own slaves, collects Titians, and prizes his Latin studies. Least bad is Emma's mother Alice, saint and central martyr to this ruffian and gout-plagued husband and father who curses Emma's unborn children when she marries Dr. Quincy Lowell of the Boston Lowells, and moves to Raleigh, North Carolina, taking with her the faithful, kind, stalwart, true household servant Clarice Washington. In Raleigh will be born the couple's three perfect daughters, and there the war will rage, taking an always-greater toll as the years grind on, supplies grow meager, and both Quincy and Emma work beyond endurance in the horrors of the military hospital. History throughout is summoned up in the tiniest of details - "her frock, deep green velvet with red grosgrain running like Christmas garlands around her skirt" - and though Emma's voice is intended to be of its period, it unfortunately tends also toward the wearying ("Without my brother, I would not have known to use books as a haven, a place to go when pain has invaded my citadel"). A book of saints, sinners, and sorrows offering much pleasure for history-snoopers (hospital scenes among the best) but finding no new ground for the saga of the South. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is at war with herself. Born to privilege on a grand plantation she grows up more and more aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. As she looks back on her troubled childhood, her attempt to create the ideal happy home through marriage, and the war that destroyed the rhythm of all their days, so she begins the long journey towards her own reconstruction. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.