A Summons to Memphis Book

One of the most celebrated novels of its time, the Pulitzer Prize winner A Summons to Memphis introduces the Carver family, natives of Nashville, residents, with the exception of Phillip, of Memphis, Tennessee.

During the twilight of a Sunday afternoon in March, New York book editor Phillip Carver receives an urgent phone call from each of his older, unmarried sisters. They plead with Phillip to help avert their widower father's impending remarriage to a younger woman. Hesitant to get embroiled in a family drama, he reluctantly agrees to go back south, only to discover the true motivation behing his sisters' concern. While there, Phillip is forced to confront his domineering siblings, a controlling patriarch, and flood of memories from this troubled past.

Peter Taylor is one of the masters of Southern literature, whose work stands in the company of Eudora Walty, James Agee, and Walker Percy. In A Summons to Memphis, he composed a richly evocative story of revenge, resolution, and redemption, and gave us a classic work of American literature.

Publishers Weekly

It seems amazing that only now has Taylorwell advanced in a life that seems as measured as his lucid prosedelivered himself of a second novel. It has been as well worth waiting for as a treasure uncovered after years of searching. As in his celebrated short stories, Taylor here offers a reconstruction of an earlier era in a distinctively Southern settinga closely knit society permeated by inflexible codes of conduct whose consequences reach through the generations. This is the story of the Carver family, formerly of Nashville, whose move to Memphis was the result of the father's betrayal by his best friend and major legal client. Phillip Carver, the narrator, tells of the events that followed from that move, in which his autocratic father destroyed the lives of his wife and all four of his children. The circumstances are affected by the particular milieu of Memphis, just a few hundred miles away from Nashville, but having its own accents of speech, social hierarchy, customs and patterns of behavioreven a certain style of dressing. Taylor conveys these characteristics in the same way that he evokes personality: with an accretion of detail built on sensitive and sympathetic observation. As the novel unfolds, what seems a simple story becomes weighted with psychological nuances, revealed as layer after layer of family secrets is stripped away. In a beautifully constructed symmetry, events come full circle; the revelation of paternal hubris also unmasks treachery and festering resentment and fully illuminates the tragedy of hopes dashed and young lives wasted. Through a final, wrenching irony, Phillip eventually comes to understand the wellsprings of his father's character, and he is able to achieve empathy and forgiveness. Master raconteur Taylor casts implicationsfar wider than his novel's settingabout the insidious undercurrents in family relationships. This is a wise book, and despite its deliberate understatement, a profoundly affecting one. (October 6)