For Merelene Durham it's been fifteen years of coping, of determination not to lose her purchase on this world, a world that has become almost unendurable since her rakish husband, Mayfield, fled after encephalitis turned their son Roland's mind into a strange, shell-holed country.

Blind Tongues is the story of what happens when Mayfield unexpectedly returns, and his conviction that a newly made fortune can make Roland whole again -- of a brilliant local attorney whose body bears the scars of aviation heroics in World War II -- and finally of Merelene herself, who must choose between these two competitors in love while trying to accept the sweet simplicity of her ageless son.

"Blind Tongues is a stunning novel. Sterling Watson creates a woman of great richness in a prose that is at once movingly lyrical and lucid. His voice rises to that rare level of genius that characterizes only our very best novelists. Blind Tongues is a story with power and suspense at every turn, and gold in every sentence."

--James Hall, author of Under Cover of Daylight