The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter

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