In an elite New England college, Professor Steven Brookman embarks upon a careless affair with a brilliant but reckless student, Maud Stack. She is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and is known as something of a firebrand on campus. As the stakes of their relationship prove higher than either one could have anticipated, their union seems destined to yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.
Robert Stone's fast-paced new novel... takes as its presiding muse not Conrad or Graham Greene, but Nathaniel Hawthorne... His gift for orchestrating suspense and dramatic scenes - so vividly on display in Damascus Gate, his 1998 novel set in Jerusalem and Gaza - is deployed here with efficiency and elan. As is his talent for charting his characters psychological and spiritual longings... The result is at once a Hawthorne-like allegory and a sure-footed psychological thriller. - New York Times
In his fiction, Robert Stone is immersed no less profoundly in envisioning the drama of human evil in action than was the great French Catholic novelist and Nobel Laureate, Francois Mauriac. Not only with his brilliant new novel, Death of the Black-Haired Girl but from the early novels such as Dog Soldiers and A Flag at Sunrise down to later books like Damascus Gate and Bay of Souls, he has demonstrated again and again that he is no less a master than Mauriac of the tragic novel--of depicting the fatal inner workings of revenge, hatred, betrayal, and zealotry--and that, like Mauriac, he is the pitiless guardian of a cast of sufferers on whose tribulations he manages to bestow a kind of shattered mercy. -- Philip Roth
Author
About Robert Stone
ROBERT STONE is one of the most eminent American novelists of his generation. He won the National Book Award in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Death of the Black-Haired Girl is his eighth novel.
