The Feast of Love: A Novel
by By Baxter, Charles
Category: Fiction , Literary

National Book Award Finalist From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new 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.  In a re-imagined 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 fueling 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  Their voices resonate with each other -- disparate people joined  by the meanderings of love -- and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most  irresistible arena of life. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, The Feast of  Love is a masterful novel."Supurb.... A near perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom." -- The Washington Post Book World