Josie Tyrell, art model, runaway, and denizen of LA's rock scene finds a
chance at real love with Michael Faraday, a Harvard dropout and son of a
renowned pianist. But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking
her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black.
As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the
world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist
mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two
women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts
distrust and blind need. With the luxurious prose and fever pitch
intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale
of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence.
"A dark, crooked beauty that fulfills all the promise of White Oleander
and confirms that Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest
order."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Lushly written, dramatically plotted. . . Fitch's Los Angeles is so
real it breathes."-Atlantic Monthly
"There is nothing less than a stellar sentence in this novel. Fitch's
emotional honesty recalls the work of Joyce Carol Oates, her strychnine
sentences the prose of Paula Fox."-Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A page-turning psychodrama. . . . Fitch's prose penetrates the inner
lives of [her characters] with immediacy and bite."-Publishers
Weekly
"Fitch wonderfully captures the abrasive appeal of punk music, the
bohemian, sometimes squalid lifestyle, the performers, the drugs, the
alienation. This is crackling fresh stuff you don't read every
day."-USA Today
"In dysfunctional family narratives, Fitch is to fiction what Eugene
O'Neill is to drama."-Chicago Sun-Times
"Riveting. . . . An uncommonly accomplished page-turner."-Elle
