The promise of rest
By: Reynolds Price.
Series: A Great circle
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 353
Subjects: Mayfield family (Fictitious characters) -- Fiction; AIDS (Disease) -- Patients -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; North Carolina -- Fiction
Description: In the spring of 1993, after nine years as an architect in New York City, Wade Mayfield returns to North Carolina. This is no ordinary move; for Wade, at the age of thirty-three, has come back to his father's house to die of AIDS.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing AIDS pandemic, The Promise of Rest explores such timeless matters as love, family loyalty and suffering, race, freedom, and duty. Wade's parents, Hutch and Ann, have recently separated; but for the remaining months of their only child's life, they and their friends come together in steady care for Wade and in the knowledge and sustenance they gain from his patience and his undaunted determination to die as himself.

When death comes, they are slowly amazed to learn of the ongoing mystery Wade has arranged to reveal after his departure - a mystery that not only initiates a possible reunion for his parents but also promises to continue the proud vitality of a complex, multiracial family that had seemed destined for extinction.
Notes: This book concludes the trilogy by R. Price which began with The surface of Earth (1975), and continued with The source of light (1982)