Blue Calhoun

April 28, 1956, was the day Blue Calhoun met a sixteen-year-old girl named Luna. And for the next three decades, their love has borne consequences of the most shattering -- and ultimately, perhaps healing -- kind for everyone they know. As Blue recounts the years and their events for us -- fervently, tenderly, knowing full well his own deep responsibility -- we are made witnesses to a story of classic dimensions, a story of love and suffering, family and friendship, death and redemption.

An unforgettable novel by one of the contemporary South's most acclaimed fiction writers. Bluford "Blue" Calhoun is a recovering alcoholic whose wild ways and hard times are behind him--until a beautiful 16-year-old young woman walks into his world. . . . Previous publisher: Atheneum.

"This starts with the happiest I ever was, though it brought down suffering on everybody near me. Short as it lasted and long ago, I've never laid it all out yet, not start to finish. But if I try and half succeed, you may wind up understanding things, choosing a better road for yourself and maybe not blaming the dead past but living for the here and now, each day a clean page."

April 28, 1956, was the day Blue Calhoun met a sixteen-year-old girl named Luna. And for the next three decades, their love has borne consequences of the most shattering -- and ultimately, perhaps healing -- kind for everyone they know. As Blue recounts the years and their events for us -- fervently, tenderly, knowing full well his own deep responsibility -- we are made witnesses to a story of classic dimensions, a story of love and suffering, family and friendship, death and redemption.

Library Journal

Having survived several drunken years that nearly wrecked his marriage, Bluford Calhoun has finally settled peacefully into early middle age. He's sober now, and he's got a respectable job as a salesman at the Atkinson Music Company in 1950s Raleigh, North Carolina. Then an old classmate from the wrong side of the tracks walks into the store with her luminous, dark-haired daughter in tow, and Blue's life is changed forever. The enduring passion that young Luna Absher ignites in Blue forces him into moral quandary; ever the Southern gentleman, deeply rooted in the precepts of his time and place, he has to work hard to convince himself--and his elegant mother, Miss Ashlyn--that his wife and daughter have the strength to withstand his defection. Ultimately, Blue's defection is different from what one would expect, and though brief, its implications extend all the way to the granddaughter Blue must eventually wrest from her widowed father. Price is in top form here, forcing us to wrestle with Blue even as he wrestles with himself, portraying his anguish in painfully clear, clean prose that captures perfectly the rhythms of the South and of the human heart. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/92; an interview with Price appears on p. 123.--Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated at Duke University and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at Merton College, Oxford University, he has taught at Duke since 1958 and is now James B. Duke Professor of English.

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.