VALENTINE, by Lucius Shepard

"Perhaps the most exciting storyteller of them all … genuinely fresh imagination … strong and inventive." —Washington Post

"Like the holiday, Valentine illustrates both the allure and irrationality of our fantasies about love … surreal moments start to endow the plausible plot with a subtle absurdity that is the beauty of this small book. Without crossing the line into science fiction, Shepard manages to suspend us in a 'dream inside reality, inside the fog, which was itself a dream inside the reality.'" —Village Voice

"Structured in an epistolary style…the novel bounces back and forth between old memories and the white-hot love affair that fate has rekindled.… Valentine is the sort of book a woman can present to a male lover without worrying he'll grow bored and use it as a coaster for his beer." —Denver Post

Constructed as a love letter from a man to his married lover, Lucius Shepard's Valentine probes deep into the human heart to explore the most intense ecstasies, passions, regrets, and confusions that boil within.

Using his critically acclaimed talents as a deft and daring prose writer, Shepard creates the mysterious, sensuous landscape of Piersall, a small seaside town in South Florida, where a journalist stranded by a hurricane is unexpectedly reunited with his former love. The man and woman's brief and passionate time together in this secluded, magical place stirs up intense memories and misgivings within both of them. Months after the incident, still haunted by the emotions and sensations that he experienced, the man pens the woman a candid letter. The valentine letter becomes a narrative of their affair, the narrative then a confessional climaxing with the author's final, searing epiphany on the ephemeral nature of desire and love. The result is Valentine: a poignant, erotic, and unsentimental exploration of eros in which Shepard lays bare for his readers the chaotic, aching, and rapturous inner workings of human love.

Among Lucius Shepard's other works are the award-winning Beast of the Heartland and Other Stories, and The Jaguar Hunter, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He lives in Vancouver, Washington.

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