His Father's House - Hardcover

Meador LLM, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565540328 ISBN 13: 9781565540323

Publisher: Pelican Publishing, 1994

Synopsis

"Meador's portrait of an American man on a long journey into his father's enigmatic past is engrossing and sensitively told." --Anne Rivers Siddons, Author of Colony

In a West German manor house, Robert Trepnitz Kirkman holds in his hand a long-lost secret a letter, a photograph, and his father's account of an incident in the Argonne forest during WWI. He anxiously waits for the opportunity to reveal his secret to the schloss's baroness. But intrigue runs thick through the walls of this cold grey house when he discovers she knows of the letter, the photograph, and much more. Set in the 1970s, His Father's House is a generational tale of
politics, religion, history, romance, and mystery that relates in time across two World Wars and to the American Civil War. An odyssey through the history and lands of East and West Germany, its central character, an American law professor, becomes entangled in the affairs of a once powerful family. Thrust into this bizarre drama, he joins in the family's struggle to come together over religious, political, and emotional barriers.
His obsession with the family's history grows as he begins to see the German schloss in the same light as his own family's antebellum plantation. Both with homes ravaged by war, power taken from their hands, and bedeviled by their own past, these two families and their homelands illustrate the hazards and denouement of the powerful falling from grace.
Through the characters of Kirkman and the von Egloffsberg family, the story suggests a unique relationship between Germany and the American South. From relics found in his deceased father's house, Rob is linked to his father's experiences through his encounters with the aristocratic German family caught in the twentieth-century catastrophes of their fragmented world.

About this title

About the Author:

D. J. Meador, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Law, recently served as director of a Senate commission studying the appellate court system. Like John Winston, Meador attended the University of Alabama and the Harvard Law School. In Unforgotten , he draws on his tour of duty during the Korean War, where he served as an officer in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps. Meador's first, critically acclaimed novel, His Father's House , has been optioned for motion-picture adaptation. It is also published by Pelican.

From Publishers Weekly:

Despite merely workmanlike prose, Meador's suspenseful debut novel ingeniously melds adventure, Cold War politics, a love story and a search for roots. Looking through his deceased father's effects, law professor Rob Kirkman finds a photograph of a young woman. Stashed alongside is his father's journal, and, reading it, Rob learns that the picture was taken off a dying German soldier in WWI. Rob sets off from Alabama in 1973 to Communist East Germany in search of his father's past, locates the woman, a now-elderly baroness, and becomes ensnared in an intricate political, romantic and familial web centered around Maria Egloffsberg, who claims to be the baroness's granddaughter. Maria enlists Rob in a plot to smuggle Bibles into East Germany, but even as he falls for her, he suspects that she's a Communist spy bent on infiltrating a secret Protestant organization dedicated to reuniting Germany. Rob is jolted out of his ruminations on modern German history by his discovery that one of his relatives, a German chemical engineer, was convicted of war crimes. Meador, a University of Virginia law professor who is legally blind, offers exceptional insight into the worlds of both the blind and the sighted through his treatment of the baroness's blind son Wolfgang, who may be a double agent. Although this first novelist tends to "tell" rather than "show," his robust story crackles with intrigue while resonating with implicit moral values. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pelican Publishing
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1565540328
• ISBN 13: 9781565540323
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384