In this luminous memoir, award-winning author Leila Philip tells the story of her ancestral Hudson River home, Talavera, the mystery of her attachment to it, and her search to come to terms with the truth about her family's fascinating three-century history there. After her father's death in 1992, Philip and her family struggled to find the means to keep Talavera intact. This uphill battle led her to examine the forces that compel a family to sacrifice almost everything to hold on to a piece of land. In a historical quest both surprising and engaging, Philip addresses the tensions between memory and recorded fact and invites readers to take a new look at their own sense of home.