Synopses & Reviews
Lush, thrilling, and erotically charged, a triumph of suspense and dazzling imagination, Elizabeth Hand's
Mortal Love is an extraordinary work that spans more than a century, uniting genius past and present with strange, tensile strands of inspiration, obsession, and lust.
A tragedy that occurs in a hospital for the insane in Frankfurt, Germany, will have repercussions across decades and eras. Several weeks after the death of a female patient in a terrible fire, the poet Algernon Swinburne follows a mysterious woman through the shadows toward a remarkable event at once enthralling, stimulating, and terrifying beneath the streets of London. Years later, at the start of a new century, a struggling young artist, Radborne Comstock, is introduced to a ravishing beauty who immediately becomes his muse, his desire, and his greatest torment. It is a legacy of pleasure and madness that will be passed down to his grandson, the dilettante actor Valentine Comstock, who is plagued by disturbing and increasingly erotic visions. And in the present day a journalist named Daniel Rowlands is seduced by the bewitching and mercurial Larkin Meade, who holds the key to lost artistic masterpieces, and to secrets too devastating to imagine.
What connects these men -- and others whose grand destinies are to imagine and create -- is one woman. Eternal, unknowable, the very ideal of beauty and desirability, she exists somewhere beyond the boundaries of time, a sensuous dream of flesh and fantasy to inspire or destroy, an immortal lover ... or an angel of death.
Review
"Mortal Love is at once a painting in prose, an investigation into artistic obsession and a re-evaluation. We may see the strange, attenuated women of pre-Raphaelite art rather differently after reading Mortal Love." The Washington Post
Review
"Great fun, in an impressive synthesis of bygone times and forgotten lore." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Hand...succeeds at creating a wonderfully Gothic atmosphere, with lush visual imagery and rich poetic language." Library Journal
Review
"Don't turn the pages too fast if you can help it." John Crowley
Review
"I think she has written the best book of her generation." Peter Straub
Review
"Elizabeth Hand is a writer whose vision, and whose writing into that extraordinary vision of hers, is exceptional." Bradford Morrow
Synopsis
The breakout book from an acclaimed author, Mortal Love is a powerful, beautifully-written and romantic story of art, obsession, and imagination that ranges from Victorian London to present-day New York.
About the Author
A New York Times notable and multiple award- winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written seven novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.