"In booming postwar Brooklyn, young David Nowak cannot fit in. His family, a pillar of the Polish immigrant community, is at a loss to help their boy, who is obsessive, neurotic and wracked by insomnia. After inheriting control of the family fortune while still in high school, David abandons life in New York to travel the world. His return to the U.S. with Daisy, a young Taiwanese woman, marks an irreparable break with his past. Escaping to the Northern California wilderness, the newlyweds craft an insular, often idyllic existence for their two children, William and Gillian. But while modern life threatens to lure the children away, it is the looming madness of their parents, and its shocking legacy, that will decide their fate."--Page [4] of cover.