Fire Sermon - Hardcover

Quatro, Jamie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 150985858X ISBN 13: 9781509858583

Publisher: Picador, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

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?

(Jenny Offill, author of Dept of Speculation)

The best stories in Jamie Quatro's first collection, I Want to Show You More, are about adultery. They are passionate, sensuous, savagely intense, and remarkable for their brave dualism. . . . Moves between carnality and spirit like some franker, modernized Flannery O'Connor tale . . . Quatro has a poet's compound eye [and] fearless lyricism . . . Expansive, joyful, with forgiveness supplanting ruination. (James Woods The New Yorker)

A dogged, brutally thoughtful piece of work, and gives us a writer of great originality and apparent artistic maturity who seems to have come out of nowhere ... Strange, thrilling, and disarmingly honest. (New York Times Book Review)

A brilliant new voice in American fiction has arrived. Bright, sharp, startling, utterly distinctive, passionate, and secretive, Jamie Quatro's stories are missives from deep within the landscape of American womanhood. They take you by the heart and throat, shake you awake, and ask you to ponder the mysteries of love, parenthood, and marriage. She has earned a place alongside Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, and Alice Munro. (David Means)

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. (Samantha Harvey, author of The Wilderness and Dear Thief)

Fire Sermon is 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)

Written with a rhythmic pulse that reflects the desire it describes, Fire Sermon is a beautiful novel. (Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching)

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. (Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You)

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. (Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane)

Fire Sermon reads like a prequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and yet the world Quatro describes - a woman immersed in the Christian intellectual tradition; a life revolving around fidelity, submission, and honour; a woman grappling with temptation and renunciation - is also recogniseably our own. Passionate, vivid, and deeply questioning. (Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta and author of Mayhem)

Book Description

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 150985858X
• ISBN 13: 9781509858583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224