Fire Sermon

By Jamie Quatro

'Superb. Uncomfortable, ambiguous, erotic . . . first rate prose and an old-fashioned ability to tell a story.' Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing


Maggie is entirely devoted to her husband Thomas, their two beautiful children, and to God.

But then what begins as innocent letter writing with poet James starts to become something far more erotically charged, their meeting of minds threatening to become a meeting of bodies.

As everything Maggie believes in is thrown into doubt the reader is drawn ever deeper into the battleground of her soul.

Fire Sermon is a daring debut novel of obsession, desire and salvation that shows the radical light and dark of love itself. This is a visceral, rich and devastating portrait of life and loves lived and lost that cannot fail to echo in your own experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781509858576

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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."