On The Occasion Of My Last Afternoon

The Story

In this superb new novel from the acclaimed, bestselling author of Ellen Foster, Sights Unseen, and Charms for the Easy Life, an extraordinary woman recalls a nation's bloodiest epoch and a magnificent life forged in its fires. Born to privilege, bookish & sensitive Emma Garnet Tate is keenly aware that her family's prosperity is built on slavery, & she sets herself against her domineering, self-made father at an early age. Told in the charmingly eccentric voice that evokes a bygone era, Emma's tale reflects on a life rich with triumph & tragedy against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century American South. This novel, set before & during the Civil War, tells of the childhood of a Southern belle, her marriage to a Northern doctor, & her transformation from a self-absorbed child to a loving, mature wife & mother. Sprawling in its scope but heartbreakingly exact in its depiction of a family torn apart, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is a magnificent novel in the great Southern tradition. In the year 1900--on the afternoon she suspects might be the last of her long, eventful life--Emma Garnet Tate Lowell sets down on paper what came before, determined to make an honest account of it. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grew up determined to escape the domination of her bullying, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, and ultimately seceded from his control to marry Quincy Lowell, a surgeon and member of the distinguished Boston family. But then came the Civil War. Working alongside Quincy, assisting him in the treatment of wounded soldiers, she witnessed scenes that would be engraved forever in her memory. And, before beginning the long journey of her own reconstruction, she must face the shame of her relationship to her 'servants' and learn the terrible secret that shaped her father's life.