Fire Sermon

This “startlingly original” novel from the author of I Want to Show You More offers “a profound, and profoundly strange, meditation on desire” (Claire Dederer, The Atlantic).

Jamie Quatro’s remarkable debut story collection, I Want to Show You More, announcing her as “a writer of great originality” (New York Times Book Review). Now, with her first novel, Quatro delivers a portrait of female desire and the complexities of a marriage.

Married twenty years to Thomas and living in Nashville with their two children, Maggie is drawn ineluctably into a passionate affair while still fiercely committed to her husband and family. What begins as a platonic exchange between writer Maggie and poet James, gradually transforms into an emotional and erotically-charged bond that challenges Maggie’s sense of loyalty and morality, drawing her into the depths of desire.

Using an array of narrative techniques and written in spare, elegant prose, Jamie Quatro gives us a compelling account of one woman’s emotional, psychological, physical, and spiritual yearnings—unveiling the impulses and contradictions that reside in us all. Fire Sermon, “full of vivid, mercurial prose, breathes new life into [its] subject and sets it gloriously ablaze” (Claire Luchette, O Magazine).