The Feast of Love

Description

A superb novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people. 'The Feast of Love' is just that -- a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. Shortlisted for the National Book Award. In this latter-day 'Midsummer Night's Dream', men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones. In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fuelling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, 'The Feast of Love' is a masterful novel.

Charles Baxter lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan. He is the author of six previous works of fiction, including Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net.

'Rich, strange, alive with the miracles of daily life, this novel is a banquet for the soul. So many wonderful characters, all of whom I came to cherish ! Truly, this is a novel in which the unexpected is always upon us.' Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal 'Superb. A near-perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom. He has created a world no very different from one of those panoramic town scenes of Bruegel or Stanley Spencer -- each character fully realised yet part of the larger whole -- that one does not so much look at as step into, and from which one emerges a little transformed.' Washington Post 'A spectacular novel that serves up everything its title promises.' New York Post 'A well plotted, deeply humane kaleidoscope of lives.' Time Out 'This novel can cure insomnia, easing the self-recriminatory worries that cause sleepless nights; it might even briefly reconcile the reader to life.' TLS