From the publication of his famous first novel, A Long and Happy Life, in 1962, Reynolds Price has been accorded the praise and admiration reserved for America's most distinguished writers. (On the publication of that much loved book, Eudora Welty wrote, "Reynolds Price is the most impressive new writer I've come across in a long time. He is a first-rate talent and we are lucky that he has started so young to write so well.") In the years since, he has published many other acclaimed novels (most notably the 1986 novel Kate Vaiden, which won the Book Critics Circle Award for fiction), collections of stories, poems, plays, criticism, translations and a memoir. Now, with Blue Calhoun, Reynolds Price has written the most searching, most passionate, most accomplished book of his long, rich and varied career. As the book opens, Blue (short for Bluford) Calhoun, the narrator, is compelled to examine his past, from the mid-1950s to the present. For Blue, the '50s were a time when the world was in order and he was, finally, at peace: a recovering alcoholic, he had been sober for nineteen months; his marriage and family life were more satisfying than ever; even his job (selling musical instruments) was the best he had ever had. "But then that one day fell down on me from a clear spring sky, no word of warning. It tore the ground from under my feet, and everything around me shook the way a mad dog shakes a howling child." April 28, 1956, was the day Blue 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.