No other tale to tell

For twenty-five years the vibrant black community in Kingston, New York, has ceased to tell its stories. Its rich oral history has been mysteriously silenced. No one talks about the events that caused this silence, but Carla March, the beautiful black woman who lives alone with her golden-skinned idiot son, remembers them with an immediacy that drives her to hammer the cellar floor late at night in anger and grief.

She is haunted by the memory of the inferno that consumed her two brothers a quarter of a century earlier, and by the memory of her father, who willed himself to die, and her mother, who followed him to the grave. And she can't forget Max, the preaching white child who arrived in flames one morning and departed in flames seventeen years later, never to be heard from again.

.

Carla has managed to strike a bargain with loss, but not life; she trusts no one. When Miles Jackson appears on her doorstep one day, the wheels of remembrance are set in fatal motion. Miles is an improbable savior, a man running from his own pain only to collide straight with hers. He is intrigued by Carla's reticence, by her strength, her stubbornness, her flashes of wit. And she is terrified by the possibilities of life Miles represents.

Finally, Carla realizes she must confront the truth of that fateful night in order to live at all. She must break the conspiracy of silence and teach the community to tell its stories once again.

. Rich with vivid language, biblical cadences, and haunting imagery, Richard Perry's novel is fashioned with lyrical intensity. His Kingston is a place saturated with loss, myth, and the possibility of love and redemption. A multilayered allegory and an unforgettable portrait of a black community in upstate New York, No Other Tale to Tell is a book about silence and its devastating costs.