About A Dual Inheritance
Hardcover: 496 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books (May 7, 2013)
For readers of Rules of Civility and The Marriage Plot, Joanna Hershon’s A Dual Inheritance is an engrossing novel of passion, friendship, betrayal, and class—and their reverberations across generations.
Autumn 1962: Ed Cantowitz and Hugh Shipley meet in their final year at Harvard. Ed is far removed from Hugh’s privileged upbringing as a Boston Brahmin, yet his drive and ambition outpace Hugh’s ambivalence about his own life. These two young men form an unlikely friendship, bolstered by a fierce shared desire to transcend their circumstances. But in just a few short years, not only do their paths diverge—one rising on Wall Street, the other becoming a kind of global humanitarian—but their friendship ends abruptly, with only one of them understanding why.
Can a friendship define your view of the world? Spanning from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the present-day stock market collapse, with locations as diverse as Dar es Salaam, Boston, Shenzhen, and Fishers Island, A Dual Inheritance asks this question, as it follows not only these two men, but the complicated women in their vastly different lives. And as Ed and Hugh grow farther and farther apart, they remain uniquely—even surprisingly—connected.
“A Dual Inheritance is a big, captivating, multigenerational sweep of a romance, ranging from Africa to China to New England’s blue-blooded enclaves. With deftness and swagger, Joanna Hershon spins the intertwining of two Harvard men’s lives into a searching exploration of class and destiny in late-twentieth-century America.”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad
“A Dual Inheritance is deep and beautiful and humane. It has a massive scope and a social conscience, and yet is also incredibly intimate. What an accomplished novel; it truly took my breath away.”—Jennifer Gilmore, author of The Mothers
About Joanna Hershon
Joanna Hershon is the author of The German Bride, The Outside of August, and Swimming. She has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Edward Albee Foundation. An adjunct assistant professor in the creative writing department at Columbia University, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons.
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Joanna Hershon’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, May 6th: Patricia’s Wisdom
Wednesday, May 8th: Book Addict Katie
Thursday, May 9th: Literally Jen
Monday, May 13th: Life, Love, & Books
Wednesday, May 15th: A Bookish Way of Life
Thursday, May 16th: BookNAround
Monday, May 20th: Becca’s Byline
Tuesday, May 21st: Luxury Reading
Thursday, May 23rd: Regular Rumination
Tuesday, May 28th: My Bookshelf
Wednesday, May 30th: Love at First Book
Wednesday, May 30th: Unabridged Chick
Thursday, May 31st: Cerebral Girl in a Redneck World