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Canongate
January 2009
On Sale: January 1, 2009
502 pages
ISBN: 1847671691
EAN: 9781847671691
Hardcover
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Fiction
An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the
fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time. The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic,
physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the
moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he is
driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what
seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine
and suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he
recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the
damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital
and commit carefully planned suicide—for he is now a
monster in appearance as well as in soul. A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged,
sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel
appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were
once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a
badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the
famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health.
As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates
equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan,
Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to
life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's
care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But
all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins
becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed
becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives
word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures
left to complete—and her time on earth will be finished. Already an international literary sensation, The Gargoyle
is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in
the impossible.
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