About the Author

Peter Taylor, the author of eight story collections, including The Old Forest and Other Stories (Picador) and three novels, including A Summons to Memphis, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and A Woman of Means (Picador), died in 1994. A Tennessee native, he had lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife, poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.

Reviews

"It moves at the unruffled pace of a lazy evening's front-porch storytelling . . . each sentence is not merely richly polished but leads to deep veins of hidden meaning." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "One of the great joys of reading Taylor is that you find yourself quickly and willingly seduced by the elegance of language and eye for detail in his writing." --San Francisco Chronicle

"It moves at the unruffled pace of a lazy evening's front-porch storytelling . . . each sentence is not merely richly polished but leads to deep veins of hidden meaning." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "One of the great joys of reading Taylor is that you find yourself quickly and willingly seduced by the elegance of language and eye for detail in his writing." --San Francisco Chronicle

The voice of Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Taylor ( A Summons to Memphis ) is a quiet one, telling tales in which much of the drama lies not in plot but rather in his watchfully observed Southern characters. The narrator of his new novel, which is scaled like an extended novella, is an elderly and successful art historian, Nathan Longforth, who recalls incidents from his Tennessee childhood and how they influenced his later life. He tells of a distant cousin, the illegitimate Aubrey Tucker Bradshaw, who had once briefly courted his mother and then disappeared (as did many ill-fitting men of that time and place), only to reappear mysteriously from time to time at family funerals. Nathan, who sometimes despairs at his lack of creativity and rejoices in signs of it in his artist son, becomes obsessed with Aubrey's memory and tries to find him. How he does so, and what the discovery reveals to him, is the essence of the novel. Taylor writes in a graciously old-fashioned manner, and the regional family intertwinings of the early years of the century are convincingly set forth. But his book, apart from occasional poignant moments like the death of Nathan's mother, is an oddly bloodless and meandering affair, with little of the life of its award-winning forebear. (Aug.)