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‘Bright and dark by turns but always shot through with a vital, unerring grace. Plus it’s about love and death, sex and God. What more could a reader want?’ Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
‘An exquisite and astonishing story of female desire, and one of the most haunting portraits of a marriage I’ve ever read.’ Lily King, author of Euphoria
‘It’s among the most beautiful books I’ve ever read about longing – for beauty, for sex, for God, for a coherent life. Great writers write with their whole lives, Jamie Quatro is such a writer, and Fire Sermon is such a book.’ Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
‘Fire Sermon moved me deeply, provoked me powerfully, and managed to reach parts of me I hadn’t even known were there. This novel stays under the skin. I feel haunted by it, in all the best ways.’ Leslie Jamieson, author of The Empathy Exams
About the author
Jamie Quatro’s is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. Her debut story collection, I Want To Show You More, was a shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is a recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.
Summary
Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband Thomas, their two beautiful children, and to God.
But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, their meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies.
As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt the reader is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul.
Fire Sermon by Jamie Quatro is a daring debut novel of obsession, desire and salvation that shows the radical light and dark of love itself. This is a visceral, rich and devastating portrait of loves lived and lost that cannot fail to echo in your own experience.
Foreword
Prizewinning Jamie Quatro’s highly anticipated and deeply intriguing debut novel will stun with its tender and unflinching story of marriage and infidelity, desire and faith.
Additional text
I loved it, and devoured it in one sitting. It’s a breathtakingly beautiful novel. The simplicity of the story sits in perfect counterpoint to the complex narrative structure. It is simultaneously visceral and cerebral, precise and expansive, domestic and metaphysical, plain-speaking and poetic. Quarto’s voice is singular, heartbreaking and gorgeous. This is a novel to be treasured.
