Tongues of Angels Book

"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 Angels is 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.

Two themes seem central to all Reynolds Price's work--the twin powers of memory and of artistry. In this new novel, a middle-aged painter recalls the events and people of the year he turned twenty-one--in particular a gifted young boy, "whose death I may have caused." His reminiscences of that long-ago time reveal the crucial forces that shaped him as an artist and as a man.