A Ring of Endless Light was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1980 and received a Newbery Honor. It is part of L’Engle’s Austin family series rather than the Time Quintet, following Vicky Austin through adolescence.
Vicky, sixteen, spends the summer on Seven Bay Island where her grandfather — a retired Episcopal minister — is dying of leukemia. Three young men compete for her attention: Zachary Gray (wealthy, self-destructive, nihilistic), Leo Dowell (earnest, reliable), and Adam Eddington (a marine biology student studying dolphin communication). Vicky discovers she can communicate telepathically with Adam’s dolphins — a gift that intensifies as her grandfather weakens.
L’Engle uses the summer’s three deaths — a family friend’s suicide, a child’s drowning, and her grandfather’s slow decline — to explore how a young person absorbs mortality. The dolphins represent a way of being present to death without being destroyed by it: they exist in the immediate, physical world without the burden of abstract dread that paralyzes Zachary.
Collecting A Ring of Endless Light
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $60–$150
- Very good in jacket: $25–$60