Flying home to New York after a much needed getaway abroad, private art conservator Mabry Kincaid learns that his downtown loft has been devastated by the World Trade Center attacks. Unable to resume his normal life, he flies south to North Carolina to visit his aged father, a widowed Episcopal priest who is cared for by live-in nurse Audrey Thornton and her grown son, Marcus. During his stay -- with help from his cantankerous father, Audrey, Marcus, and an alluring old flame named Gwyn -- Mabry is compelled to explore his tormented relationship with his father and a world he fondly remembers but has long since abandoned. Back in New York a week later, Mabry faces his old life, which lies in ruins before his eyes. There, he must once again confront change and uncertainty -- and a daunting disease that may prove fatal.

In an elegantly crafted and profoundly moving novel, Reynolds Price follows one man's wrenching journey to come to terms with two familiar worlds that have been radically altered.

About The Author

Photo Credit: Sara Barrett

Reynolds Price

Reynolds Price (1933–2011) was born in Macon, North Carolina. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he taught at Duke beginning in 1958 and was the James B. Duke Professor of English at the time of his death. His first short stories, and many later ones, are published in his Collected Stories. A Long and Happy Life was published in 1962 and won the William Faulkner Award for a best first novel. Kate Vaiden was published in 1986 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Good Priest's Son in 2005 was his fourteenth novel. Among his thirty-seven volumes are further collections of fiction, poetry, plays, essays, and translations. Price is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages.

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner (November 28, 2006)
Length: 288 pages
ISBN13: 9780743254014

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Raves and Reviews

"A major work from one of our greatest novelists." -- Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird

"Reynolds Price has steadily built one of the most durable, enviable bodies of work in all Southern literature." -- The Washington Times

"Writing with depth and sustained honesty . . . Reynolds Price gives us an enormous gift: a way to see and understand our own selves in a world forever changed." -- Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Mermaid Chair and The Secret Life of Bees

"Reynolds Price's seriousness of purpose remains undeniable. He is a writer who addresses life's urgent questions through characters much like ourselves -- fallible, frightened, lonely, seeking comfort, and sometimes even redemption, in the maelstrom." -- The New York Times Book Review