Amazon.com description: Product Description: Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendenning; his widowed mother; Glendenning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancee; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. Coming after the lukewarm reaction to Moby-Dick, Pierre was a critical and financial disaster. Initial reviewers universally condemned both its morals and its style. More recent critics have been more sympathetic, seeing it as a "psychological novel -- a study of the moods, thought processes, and perceptions of his hero." With the exception of Israel Potter, he never published another conventional novel, although he subsequently wrote and published many stories, including Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, and the experimental novel, The Confidence-Man. Pierre Glendinning, junior, is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Pierre is engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, who controls the estate since the death of his father, Pierre, senior. When he encounters, however, the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, he hears from her the claim that she is his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Pierre reacts to the story (and to his magnetic attraction for Isabel) by devising a remarkable scheme to preserve his father’s name, spare his mother’s grief, and give Isabel her proper share of the estate.