The Gargoyle is Andrew Davidson's debut novel and a powerful meditation on the meaning of love. Seven years in the writing, this first novel reads as if it had been written by a self-assured master.

From the dust jacket:

An extraordinary debut novel of love that survives the fires of hell and transcends the boundaries of time.

The narrator of The Gargoyle is a very contemporary cynic, physically beautiful and sexually adept, who dwells in the moral vacuum that is modern life. As the book opens, he 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 suffers horrible burns over much of his body. As he recovers in a burn ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned, he awaits the day when he can leave the hospital and commit carefully planned suicide -- for he is now a monster in appearance as well as in soul.

A beautiful and compelling, but clearly unhinged, sculptress of gargoyles by the name of Marianne Engel appears at the foot of his bed and insists that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly injured mercenary and she was a nun and scribe in the famed monastery of Engelthal who nursed him back to health. As she spins their tale in Scheherazade fashion and relates equally mesmerizing stories of deathless love in Japan, Iceland, Italy, and England, he finds himself drawn back to life—and, finally, in love. He is released into Marianne's care and takes up residence in her huge stone house. But all is not well. For one thing, the pull of his past sins becomes ever more powerful as the morphine he is prescribed becomes ever more addictive. For another, Marianne receives word from God that she has only twenty-seven sculptures left to complete -- and her time on earth will be finished.

Already an international literary sensation, The Gargoyle is an Inferno for our time. It will have you believing in the impossible.

Read the hardcover novel or check out the 16 CD unabridged recording, read by Lincoln Hoppe.

On caveat -- in the beginning of the novel, the narrator is involved in an auto accident where he is horribly burned. The accident and the torturous recovery are told in vivid detail. For many people it is the hardest part of the book to read and many quit.

My advice is don't quit.

This is a man's personal Hell on Earth (and if he is made up, remember thousands of burn victims suffer the same recovery as the narrator did). Read it -- in small doses if you have to -- read it and honor the suffering, for beyond it is one of the most beautiful stories of recovery -- of the body, of the spirit, of love -- that I've ever read.

It's a love story -- seven hundred years long.