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Mortal Love

by Elizabeth Hand

ISBN: 0061051705
ISBN-13: 9780061051708
Format: Hardcover

Summary

The author of the critically acclaimed WAKING THE MOON ventures into the realm of mainstream literary fantasy with this powerful work about the thin line between creativity and lunacy. In the mid-19th century, a beautiful, maddening (and probably mad) woman named Evienne Upstone serves as a devouring muse to various pre-Raphaelite artists and writers and their contemporaries, inspiring great works but also driving them insane. In the present day, a beautiful, strange woman named Larkin Meade who has spent some time in a mental hospital both maddens and inspires contemporary musicians, artists, and writers. Could Evienne and Larkin be the same woman? If so, just what is she?

Customer Reviews

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Media Reviews

"...[A] superb fantasy. Rich in historical allusions and genuinely inventive, it's an early contender for best fantasy novel of the year."    -- Don D'Ammassa

   -- Science Fiction Chronicle

"...[S]wiftly paced....[T]he conclusion is stunning."    -- Sheri Melnick

   -- Romantic Times BOOKclub

"Great fun, in an impressive synthesis of bygone times and forgotten lore." (starred review)

   -- Kirkus

"...[H]ypnotic....[A]lmost certainly...[Hand's] finest novel to date....[M]oves Hand's work into the territory of John Fowles and A.S. Byatt."    -- Gary K. Wolfe

   -- Locus

"[S]uperb....With its authentic period detail and tantalizing spirit of mystery,this timeless tale of desire and passion should reach many readers beyond her usual fantasy base." (starred review)

   -- Publishers Weekly

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Harpercollins
Published date: 2004
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.5 x 9.5 inches
Weight: 0.65 pounds
Pages: 364

Publisher's Notes

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.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Harpercollins (2004) - from $1.00
Paperback Reprint - Harpercollins (2005) - from $1.00

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Mortal Love: A Novel

Elizabeth Hand

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