Description: A Family Place is an evocative, first-person account of Leila Philip's search to uncover and then to come to terms with her family's rich and complicated past. This is a past populated by manor lords and tenant farmers, romantic-era gentlemen farmers and Civil War heroes, wealthy ne'er-do-wells, renegade aunts, and secret children, all of them inextricably linked to a white-columned mansion named Talavera, located two hours from New York City in the Hudson Valley.

Today, Talavera is managed as a commercial fruit farm called Philip Orchards. Since inheriting the estate after their father's death in 1992, Leila Philip and her four siblings have struggled to find the means to keep the house intact and the land from being consumed by development. This uphill battle has forced Philip to ask: What compels a family to risk everything -- financial well-being, its place in the modern world, even each other -- to hold on to a piece of land?

In her quest for answers, Philip began researching her family's unbreakable bond with this remarkable place. From 1730, the first year of the family tenure on the land, to the present, A Family Place chronicles a fascinating history that is full of surprises. Like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Kathleen Norris's Dakota, A Family Place is both deeply personal and broadly resonant as her search becomes entangled in the tensions between memory and recorded fact.

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