From the critically acclaimed author of I Want to Show You More comes an unflinching and profound portrait of Maggie and Thomas, and their disintegrating marriage.
Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.
Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings — unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon is an unflinchingly honest and formally daring debut novel from a writer of enormous talent.
From the critically acclaimed author of I Want to Show You More comes an unflinching and profound portrait of Maggie and Thomas, and their disintegrating marriage.
Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic intellectual and spiritual exchange between writer Maggie and poet James gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her deeper into the darkness of desire.
Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings — unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon is an unflinchingly honest and formally daring debut novel from a writer of enormous talent.
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Jan 16, 2018 |
| Specifications | 256 pages | 5.25 in x 8 in |
| Keywords | fates and furies lauren groff; swimming lessons claire fuller; marriage; infidelity; affair; choices; allusion; short books; feminism; faith; passion; sex; christianity; evangelical; religion; adultery; women writers; women's literature; my name is lucy barton elizabeth strout; i want to show you more; hunting houses; book club; |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
JAMIE QUATRO’S debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, Indie Next pick, O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. The collection was named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker, and was a finalist 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. Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 and in Ann Charters’s The Story And Its Writer. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. |
| Written By |
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JAMIE QUATRO’S debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, Indie Next pick, O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. The collection was named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker, and was a finalist 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. Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her stories are anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2013 and in Ann Charters’s The Story And Its Writer. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. |
Commended, An Economist Book of the Year, 2018
Commended, Indie Next Pick, 2018
“There’s real humanity in this novel, and there are insights about love and longing.” —New York Times
“Rolling, raw, and sensual . . . The sentences burn with desire and disquiet. The novel is generously condensed, ardently focused, and its mechanisms poetic, not expository.” —New York Times Book Review
“A lean first novel steeped in theology, suburban domesticity, literary criticism, child-rearing and, most dramatically, infidelity, Fire Sermon sizzles and cools to the rhythm of its narrator Maggie's moods and meanderings.” —Shelf Awareness
“The mechanics of Quatro’s novel are an enjoyable puzzle.” —Toronto Star
“It’s rare, to the point of near non-existence, to find a book that has such literary weight and heft, yet reads like a sonnet. I look at it in puzzlement, wondering how Jamie Quatro gives such breadth, depth, and intensity in so few words. And it’s funny, and real, and painful, so painful. Also a shot of light. An education. A mirror. Terrifying.” —
“I devoured this novel! Quatro is a fearless marvel. An exquisite story of female desire, faith, and commitment, and one of the most haunting portraits of a marriage I’ve ever read.” —
“It would be difficult to overstate the wonder I felt while reading this novel. 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, with everything they have seen and thought and felt, with their obsessions and their desires; their books have the density and richness of existence. Jamie Quatro is a such a writer, and Fire Sermon is such a book.” —
“This book is 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?” —