John Mears

Ancestral Voices: a Novel of America John Mears

Ancestral Voices is multi-generational epic that traces the histories of several families from the earliest settlement of America to contemporary times. The main conflict of the story develops from a dispute between two brothers in the wake of the War of Independence that has disastrous, as well as joyous consequences almost two centuries later for some of their descendants when the family is reconnected. The novel begins in 1969, the height of the Vietnam War. The central character, Katharine Carter Harrison--about to enter Yale's first coed class--struggles with her identitiy, which is an amalgam of her Connecticut father and her Virginia mother, and with the fate of her beloved brother who enlists to fight in Vietnam. When a distant cousin, Aaron Keeler, unexpectedly enters the lives of Katharine and her brother, it seems that some perverse hand of destiny is at work, as well as a curse that has run through the family for centuries. Ancestral Voices is a compelling love story, a tale of generational revenge, and a saga where the main characters suffer from obsessions with their ancestral past and a terrifying nexus between fiction and reality.