The Gargoyle
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4.4 • 54 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A young man is fighting for his life.
Into his room walks a bewitching woman who believes she can save him.
Their journey will have you believing in the impossible.
The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over - he is now a monster.
But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life - and, finally, to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Davidson's powerful debut, the unnamed narrator, "a coke-addled pornographer," drives his car off a mountain road in a part of the country that's never specified. During his painful recovery from horrific burns suffered in the crash, the narrator plots to end his life after his release from the hospital. When a schizophrenic fellow patient, Marianne Engel, begins to visit him and describe her memories of their love affair in medieval Germany, the narrator is at first skeptical, but grows less so. Eventually, he abandons his elaborate suicide plan and envisions a life with Engel, a sculptress specializing in gargoyles. Davidson, in addition to making his flawed protagonist fully sympathetic, blends convincing historical detail with deeply felt emotion in both Engel's recollections of her past life with the narrator and her moving accounts of tragic love. Once launched into this intense tale of unconventional romance, few readers will want to put it down.
Customer Reviews
The Gargoyle.
I have read this book three times now, it is the most amazing story of love and suffering. Beautifully written, disturbingly accurate and darkly humorous. I know I shall return to this story time and time again.
I truly loved it.
Awesome
I was skeptical when my wife told me to read this book, I shouldn't have been, it was the best and most enthralling book I read in 2010, buy it read it you won't be sorry.
Beautiful Story
I loved this book it was incredible, dark and passionately wrote. Could put it down.