From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Summons to Memphis, here is Peter Taylor's first novel in eight years - a subtle, civilized, evocative story about a Tennessee-bred man's obsession with recovering a vanished cousin and understanding the nature of his disappearance.

In 1916, a young boy, Nathan Longfort, is on the funeral train bearing the body of his grandfather, the Senator, from Washington, D.C., to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the memory of this long, traumatic journey will haunt him the rest of his life.

It is on this trip that he meets and is fascinated by the oddly disturbing Cousin Aubrey - a person of "irregular kinship" (that is, illegitimate). Why does Aubrey make the women of the family feel so uneasy? Why are the men so condescending to him? Why is Aubrey so hostile to this young boy? And why does Aubrey soon thereafter disappear?

Throughout the years, as Nathan grows up to become a well-respected art historian, wanting to be (but never becoming) an artist, he compulsively collects rumors of Aubrey's elusive faraway life - as Nathan's mother's first true love, a charmer of European society, a Don Juan, a worldly success - and sees it in stinging contrast to his own unfulfilled dreams. That is, until the day when, finally, he tracks his cousin down ...

Written in the great Southern storytelling tradition, Peter Taylor's novel is a probing and alluring exploration of the crossroads in life and the paths chosen.