Fire Sermon

By Jamie Quatro

The much-anticipated debut novel from celebrated Jamie Quatro, whose NAIBA bestselling first book of stories I Want to Show You More published to a trifecta of raves from James Wood of the New Yorker, Dwight Garner at the New York Times, and J. Robert Lennon for the New York Times Book Review

Set between Chicago, Nashville, and NYC, Fire Sermon is a searing and erotic portrait of obsession and infidelity in which a married woman, Maggie, finds herself in a passionate intellectual relationship with a poet, James. Unlike I Want to Show You More, in Fire Sermon, the affair turns physical.

Like Marilynn Robinson, David Means and Flannery O’Connor, religion and faith backdrop the lives of Quatro’s characters, heightening the tension between their actions and their morality.

Fire Sermon went to auction in the UK with Paul Baggaley at Picador winning out to become Quatro’s first UK publisher. He compared the novel to Light Years by James Salter. Atlas Contact will publish in The Netherlands, Minimum Fax in Italy, and House of Anansi in Canada.

I Want To Show You More was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013, a New Yorker Favorite Book of 2013, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. It was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, an Indie Next pick, an O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Quatro’s work has been compared with that of Flannery O’ Connor, Lydia Davis, Franz Kafka, George Saunders, Walter Percy, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lorrie Moore, and Alice Munro.

Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is currently a Contributing Editor at the Oxford American magazine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9780802165558

Jamie Quatro

JAMIE QUATRO’s debut collection, I Want To Show You More, was a New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, O, The Oprah Magazine summer reading pick, and New York Times Editors’ Choice. The collection was named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by Dwight Garner in the New York Times, a Favorite Book of 2013 by James Wood in The New Yorker, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Georgia Townsend Fiction Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She is a recipient of a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Quatro’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Tin House, Bomb, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, The New York Times Book Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Quatro lives with her husband and four children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

Reviews for Fire Sermon

[overgaard-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

see her web page - much better reviews than I could give - fascinating work

[achedglin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book took me by surprise. I was initially skeptical of the subject matter, but Quatro really probes the meaning of protagonist Maggie Ellmann's actions and desire. There are will be some readers, including myself, who can't help but judge Maggie's actions, which is fair if you're open to constant reevaluation. Quatro's writing is beautiful without being pretentious or showoff-y, and the disparate forms Quatro uses to compose the narrative fit seamlessly together. I'd recommend this to most any fiction reader as a challenging, worthwhile, feminist read.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not going to summarize the plot to Jamie Quatro's first novel, because the book is less interested in a plot than it is in exploring faith and infidelity. This is a gutsy book and Quatro is fearless in writing a book that is guaranteed to alienate a large proportion of its potential readers. The novel centers on a woman who is deeply committed to her Evangelical faith and who also has an extra-marital relationship. See? A bunch of you decided not to read the book because of one thing or the other. Fire Sermon is an introspective and thoughtful novel, one that is willing to explore ideas and doesn't flinch from honestly portraying some very uncomfortable themes. While I disagreed with the protagonist often, there's no question that she wrestled with her thoughts and actions. I'm looking forward to reading whatever Quatro writes next and I've got her earlier book of short stories on my wish list.

[lucaconti-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read it in one day after watching two booktubers talking about it. Very original storytelling. Not always compelling but I felt invested in the main characters. Recommended

[miss.mesmerized · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

He was her first partner and is supposed to be her last. Meggie and Thomas have been married for more than 20 years, raised to nice children and, if looked at from the outside, a perfect life. When Meggie discovers the poet James and writes to him because he seems to be the one who can express what she, too, feels, she sets in motion a chain of events. Months of e-mails, James and Maggie get closer and closer on an emotional basis. Then they finally meet and the faithful believer Maggie and -especially her body – reacts in a way she has never believed to be possible. It is a short encounter, and a second, not even a real affair, but a bond has been created which threatens their lives as they have known it.Fire Sermon – a discourse delivered by Buddha in which he describes that you need to burn to achieve liberation from suffering. Only if you detach yourself from your senses through the burning process can you reach a higher level of existence. The burning can occur through passion, aversion, delusion and suffering. Meggie, Jamie Quarto’s protagonist in whose head we find ourselves as the reader, goes through all four of them.She feels passion, after so many years married not anymore for her husband, but for the poet with whom she feels connected immediately. Aversion is what she experiences in bed, aversion towards her husband, whom she loves but not in those moments when he is selfish and she either complies with his wishes to find peace or opposes him and risks a fight. Delusion – she is thinking of what her life could be, how it could have been and what she might get if she gives up her family. Last, suffering. She suffers a lot, from remorse and guilt, but also physically and emotionally. At times she goes through hell.Jamie Quarto does not narrate a love story, but a story about love. Different kinds of love. Love full of passion, love full of emotion, love that goes deep, love that is stronger than anything else. And love that hurts. There are different layers of love, different types which are experienced with different people. And looming around the corner is always the question: does love require faithfulness and singularity? Or can you love different people in different ways at the same time? And how can this be reconciled with the Christian idea of marriage? The author does not provide you with answers, just with the example of one woman and how she finds answers to those questions. I really liked the novel even though at times I found it hard to endure. But it is so easy to sympathise and identify with Meggie and her worries that you can easily immerge into it.

[josephcamilleri-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Life is messy. And sometimes we make it messier still. Take Margaret – or Maggie, to her friends. She comes from a well-off and tight-knit family which has given her a comfortable and solid upbringing. Raised an Evangelical, she remains a committed Christian into adulthood. Indeed, her approach to religion is quite intellectual, with a lively interest in comparative religions (and particularly the contrast between Western and Eastern faiths), early Church fathers and mysticism. Maggie is an academic, “nerdy” type – she graduates with flying colours in her early twenties. At around the same time she marries Thomas, choosing to abandon the prospects of a glittering career to dedicate time to her new family. She does keep contacts in academia though, retains modest teaching posts over the years and also tries her hand at creative writing, particularly poetry. As for Thomas, he’s a successful professional, an all-round decent guy and a good-looking one at that, the type of man who gladly helps out with their son and daughter, who would never cheat on his wife and who makes Maggie’s female friends rather jealous. The cherry on the cake is an unexpected legacy from a rich uncle which makes what seems an already charmed life even easier, enabling Thomas and Maggie to settle down comfortably in Nashville with their kids.

Could there be a marriage as strong and stable as Maggie’s? It seems not. But in her forties, Maggie embarks on a correspondence with James, a (married) poet who shares her spiritual and literary concerns. And what starts as a seemingly innocent exchange of emails eventually leads to a physical encounter, consummated with a passion that Maggie has never known with her husband. This experience is so beautiful to Maggie that she finds she cannot condemn her actions, even whilst seeking to save her marriage to another man she also loves, and whilst struggling to remain true to her principles and Christian values.

This is Jamie Quatro’s first novel, following the publication of an acclaimed collection of stories some years back. And what a breathtaking debut it is. What I particularly enjoyed is its original and yet beguiling storytelling approach, which seems to draw us effortlessly into Maggie’s mental struggles. Maggie is clearly the protagonist and she remains the focal point throughout the novel. Yet the perspective seems to be constantly shifting, thanks to continuous changes in the narrative mode. There are passages in the first person, others in a more “objective” (is it?) third person; there are flashbacks and flashforwards, passages of dialogue, extracts from journals, prayers; there’s a lot of philosophy and theology; there are what seem to be transcripts of counselling sessions (although they could be read as Maggie arguing with herself, or with God); there’s poetry – and I mean actual poems, not poetic writing (although there’s much of that too). And, towards the end, there’s the “Fire Sermon” itself, Maggie’s defiant statement/confession/manifesto about sin, temptation, God, marriage, love. All these seem to be pieces of a mosaic which build into an intriguing psychological, emotional portrait.

The novel works at many levels. It is, in essence, a love story (or two of them rolled into one). It is a family saga with elements of a coming-of-age novel. But it is also a book rich in philosophical insights about religion(s), about how faith informs the life of practising Christians and about how these same believers can convince themselves that they are in the right, even when acting against religious tenets they hold dear. You might not agree with Maggie’s choices or with her theology. No problem – she is herself often contradictory and admits as much. But her spiritual journey is the stuff of great novels. I’m ready to bet that this will be one of the most talked-about debuts in the coming year.

A copy of this book was kindly provided by the publishers via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the best renditions of justifiable and sympathetic adultery ever. "Love is touching souls/Surely you touched mine" - Joni Mitchell. Here a male poet and a female religious philosopher meet via a fan letter and end up being irrevocably attracted. Her marriage has rocky times - her husband has impulses of inappropriate sexual venom; his wife is not described, as it's all told from her point of view. But the reader senses that essential attraction of Maggie to her husband Thomas, their home life with their children, would all have been on stable and primarily happy and secure ground, had she not picked up a book of James' poetry.There's a bunch of religious/spiritual discourse that I skimmed and skipped. But the language and the utter rightness and wrongness of all the awful decisions to be made is shattering.Quotes: "The look on his face was one I would become familiar with, whenever we were together: amusement on the surface, admiration beneath. A kind of ease, something already understood. We belong to each other.""The safe way to let yourself fall in love with someone who isn't your spouse: imagine the life you might have together after both your spouses have passed away.""C.S. Lewis says that if we were able to return to the locus of our nostalgia, the place or person or spot of time in which we experienced joy, we would find only more nostalgia.""Whenever she thinks of it - of him - her present surroundings electrify.""It is here they will begin to wait. The giving-away, throwing-away, earmarking for relatives, a gradual winnowing of objects.""If we could just keep this, he said. If we could just walk out of here together and merge our lives with no fallout.We might turn into the same person, I said.Darling, he said, pulling my forehead down to his. We already are."