Love as a Stranger - Owen Marshall

Brilliantly tracing the progress of unexpected love and the perils of relationships, this gripping novel is a tour de force.

Temporarily in Auckland while her husband is undergoing treatment, Sarah enjoys a walk in the coolness of the Symonds Street Cemetery. As she pauses at the grave of Emily Keeling, murdered in 1886 by a rejected suitor, a stranger named Hartley strikes up a conversation. Before long he arranges to meet Sarah for coffee.

So their friendship begins, and soon blossoms into an affair, rich in mutual understanding and sexual excitement. But love may become obsession, which brings with it disquieting demands, even menace.

‘When love is not madness, it is not love.’ 

Shortlisted, 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. 

Serialised for radio. 

Owen Marshall draws characters with near photographic realism. It is through the eye of a supremely empathetic god that Owen Marshall narrates his excellent latest novel Love as a Stranger. We are favoured with a view of the inner lives of two people as they find themselves fated to reiterate one of the oldest human stories. . . . the profound understanding of how the undercurrents of our personalities are mirrored on the surface . . . it is empathy that is the engine of Marshall's fiction, which enables him to make statements about the human condition that resound with the authority of aphorism. . . . His strongest work has always been informed by a sense of the paradoxical emptiness and richness of ordinary lives, of the sheer pleasure of being in spite of death and all its negations. . . . And that is the appeal at the heart of this novel, and in the end, at the heart of the human condition. John McCrystal, The Listener

Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2016. Trade paperback, 304 pages. 

Condition: secondhand paperback in good condition.