The Feast of Love
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.
‘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
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