Desire - by Molly Gaudry (Paperback)

About the Book

Traumatized by the events of We Take Me Apart, the unlikely heroine of Desire: A Haunting leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl-whose cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between "dog" and a ghost calling herself "Ogie."

Book Synopsis

Traumatized by the events of We Take Me Apart, the unlikely heroine of Desire: A Haunting leads a silent life in the cottage that has been in her family since Hester Prynne first bequeathed it to Pearl--whose endearingly cranky spirit remains. So begins this strange friendship between "dog" and a ghost calling herself "Ogie." A different kind of love story, Desire is about how dog and Ogie learn to care for each other after only pretending to at first, about how they adopt a ghost child named William whose fascination with holidays brings celebration to the cottage, and about how long-ago dresses made from flowers stitch the three of them closer and invites new spirit into their lives.

Review Quotes

"Even alone, writes Molly Gaudry, 'we are not unloved.' And indeed, a reader cannot help but be trapped in tentacles of love when reading her twisting, tender Desire: A Haunting. No one but Gaudry paints language with so much care, with so much lonely, heart-dreamed beauty. No one else paints scars so naked and so necessary. This book is a breathing thing, a piece of life-in-love-in-art." --Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and Other Stories

"Each page is an epiphany of spectral nesting dolls: open love to expose lamentation; crack the soft skeleton of memory to release matriarchal debt--and hidden inside it all, Gaudry's spare lyric floats through us, ethereal and elegant." --Lily Hoang, author of A Bestiary

"This book is more poem than most poems-- ghosts--literary and created--populating a prose broken into savage and sweet lines--hands drawn through viscera and the appearance thereof--to concoct a drama as yet untold yet retold a thousand times over: love love love love love, I love you I love you. Molly Gaudry is our Neruda, our Marquez, our chronicler of times spent and as yet foretold." --Jamie Iredell, author of Last Mass

"With the sharpest of knives, Molly Gaudry carves richness and poverty, sadness and sweetness, violence and love into the reader's consciousness. A cut neck, a suicide, a drowning, you want to look away, but you don't, because you would miss your chance to live. Desire: A Haunting is a perfect, tender book." --Amina Cain, author of Creature

"This is a delightful, unsettling & addictive book in which the dead speak to & follow the living, in which memory knots into presence, in which love is always a ghost." --Mathias Svalina, author of Destruction Myth