Tongues of Angels A Novel

"I'm as peaceful a man as you're likely to meet in America now, but this is about a death I may have caused. Not slowly over time by abuse or meanness but on a certain day and by ignorance, by plain lack of notice. Though it happened thirty-four years ago, and though I can't say it's haunted my mind that many nights lately, I suspect I can draw it out for you now, clear as this noon. I may need to try."Set in a summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains during the deceptively tranquil 1950s,The Tongues of Angelsis a story of the twenty-one-year-old painting teacher, a superbly gifted boy, and their advance toward a startling fate. As the now-older man looks back at on that summer, he reflects on the meanings he thought he had learned on the threshold of manhood from the perspective of full maturity.

Reynolds Price is the author of more than thirty books, including Roxanna Slade, A Singular Family, and Kate Vaiden, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in the Piedmont countryside of North Carolina.