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

On a burn ward, a man lies between living and dying, so disfigured that no one from his past life would even recognize him. His only comfort comes from imagining various inventive ways to end his misery. Then a woman named Marianne Engel walks into his hospital room, a wild-haired, schizophrenic sculptress on the lam from the psych ward upstairs, who insists that she knows him – that she has known him, in fact, for seven hundred years. She remembers vividly when they met, in another hospital ward at a convent in medieval Germany, when she was a nun and he was a wounded mercenary left to die. If he has forgotten this, he is not to worry: she will prove it to him.

And so Marianne Engel begins to tell him their story, carving away his disbelief and slowly drawing him into the orbit and power of a word he'd never uttered: love.


From the Hardcover edition.

"A transportingly unhinged debut novel....[THE GARGOYLE] incorporate[s] a wild, seemingly random array of tricks and tangents. But Mr. Davidson binds them together with vigorous and impressive narrative skill."

Janet Maslin, New York Times, 07/31/2008

"This is an insane but well-crafted book, as grotesque as its heroine's carvings....Some novels about love's pains and rewards move far beyond common sense....One reason why poets have been so keen to send lovers to the pains of death or hell is that these are the things we feel love is like. Andrew Davidson does this, and more: his first novel is a fever dream of passion which does not have to make entire sense, because it is a powerful metaphor for deep emotion."

Roz Kaveney, Independent (London), 09/12/2008

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