Fire Sermon - Softcover

Tender and tumultuous, Fire Sermon is a remarkable novel written by a uniquely talented author. * Financial Times * Do religious rules heighten the thrill of sexual transgression? Can adulterous passion inch us towards Divine Love? These questions thrum through Jamie Quatro's strange and lyrical debut novel Fire Sermon . . . a powerful psychological meditation on erotic desire . . . Quatro's descriptions of yearning are beautifully pitched. * Evening Standard * Part of Fire Sermon's undeniable power lies in how it is exactly the kind of story more often told from a man's point of view - fiction so rarely puts a woman's midlife desire under the microscope in this way. * Daily Mail * Sexy, thoughtful and lyrical all at once, this novel is about the brief affair between Maggie and James and the meeting of artistic minds. * Elle * Jamie Quatro, in her very sad first novel, Fire Sermon squeezes large flows of time into a book as thin as my little finger. Time haunts every sentence. * New York Times Magazine * Charged with erotic energy and an almost mystical yearning, Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon, is a tour de force exploration of lust, marriage, longing, and love. Quatro's special magic as a writer is her ability to illuminate and intensify Maggie's secret (and ultimately finite) love affair so that it seems to resonate across decades of Maggie's life . . . A virtuosic portrait of flesh-and-blood sensuality and the mystery of salvation. * Elle USA * Adultery may be a tale as old as time, but Quatro's take is freshly urgent, as she grapples with themes of desire, sin, commitment, guilt and renunciation while writing frankly about both marital and extramarital sex. Thorny theological issues and literary allusions to writers ranging from John Updike and Lydia Davis to Sharon Olds and Linda Gregg underpin the novel. ... "Fire Sermon" burns with emotional honesty. Unlike the great adulteresses of fiction, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary, Quatro's conflicted heroine is not miserably married; nor is her lover an unworthy boor. The result is an impassioned, deeply moral exploration of devotion and "what's waiting on the far side of fidelity. * San Francisco Chronicle * Switching between erotically charged letters and just as inflamed vignettes (think Dept. of Speculation), this debut novel documents a wild affair. Maggie-wife, mother, and Christian-finds herself soul-searching, confessing, and downright reveling in her passion for a man who's not her husband. Don't get too close to the fire. * Elle * Jamie Quatro has taken one of the great themes - infidelity - and subjected it to her own exacting and poetic brand of scrutiny. At times painfully honest, always intensely felt, Fire Sermon is a moving and gripping novel of the emotions.' -- Rupert Thompson, author of Secrecy What an absolutely beautiful and moving book. I started reading Fire Sermon and literally, was cranky when I couldn't get back to it. The writing is nothing less than masterful. I've always been a HUGE fan of Jamie Quatro but now she's taking my fandom to another level. -- Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming and Another Brooklyn A stunning first novel about faith and yearning in the crucible of a strained marriage and a brief affair. The lyric cadence of Quatro's writing gets into one's veins as she stealthily transforms the most common of plotlines into a scorching analysis of the "agony of temptation," prayer, the relationship between Eros and the divine, and a "renewed sense of holiness." Maggie longs for a "return to a viable literature of faith." Quatro infuses that tradition with fresh, molten energy. * Booklist * Fire Sermon moved me deeply, provoked me powerfully, and managed to reach parts of me I hadn't even known were there. It has so much to say about desire and what it means to commit yourself to a life, what it means to desire deeply what might destroy the life you've made for yourself. Quatro's prose lives in both the mind and body, refusing to recognize any kind of meaningful border between them. This novel stays under the skin. I feel haunted by it, in all the best ways. -- Leslie Jamieson, author of The Empathy Exams Fire Sermon is a book of radical acts and commitments, one that made me understand how these underpin our everyday lives and longings. It is a novel I won't soon forget. -- Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse: Women Walk the City 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 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 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 Written with a rhythmic pulse that reflects the desire it describes, Fire Sermon is a beautiful novel. -- Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching 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 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 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 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 * 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 * 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

'Superb. Uncomfortable, ambiguous, erotic . . . first rate prose and an old-fashioned ability to tell a story.' Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing 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 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 life and loves lived and lost that cannot fail to echo in your own experience.