A Desert of Pure Feeling - Softcover

Freeman, Judith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679752714 ISBN 13: 9780679752714

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1997

Synopsis

From the writer whose voice Carolyn See has characterized as one of the strangest, most distinguished in American fiction writing today ("There is really nothing to compare her with, except, maybe, the austere beauty of a Japanese rock garden"), here is a richly dramatic novel about a woman struggling to make peace with herself as a mother, a lover, an artist, and a friend.

Lucy Patterson has just encountered her past in the person of a man whom she has not seen for twenty-five years. Dr. Carlos Cabrera saved the life of her infant son, and it was her love for him that compelled her to end her marriage -- the first moment in an arc of emotional turbulence and upheaval that has since defined her existence. Her past having caught up with her, Lucy has come to an isolated motel in the desert outside Las Vegas to write out her life, reexamine it, and, she hopes, find its calm center. It's a journey she is determined to make alone, but in the next room is a young woman -- a single mother, stripper, and prostitute panicked about her own life -- whom Lucy finds she cannot, and finally does not want to, ignore. A fiercely odd pair, they nonetheless become indispensable to each other in navigating the emotional terrain of their past and in finding, separately and together, clear paths into the future.

A Desert of Pure Feeling is the finest work we have yet seen from a writer whose gifts, at once lyrical and tough-minded, become vividly apparent in this penetrating and compelling story.

About this title

From the Publisher

"How refreshing it is to read a book where the words don't exceed the meaning to take on a (often useless) life of their own but are there to express or fulfill that meaning as exactly as possible."
-- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

"Graceful, lyrical, and deeply honest, A Desert of Pure Feeling sings to each of us our sorrows and then delicately, bravely turns them into the light."
-- Pam Houston

"Judith Freeman writes with an authority that can only be earned through solitude. A Desert of Pure Feeling honors the interior spaces of the human heart, what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget."
-- Terry Tempest Williams

"Judith Freeman is one of the finest writers of our generation."
-- Walter Mosley

"Once again, as she did so brilliantly in The Chinchilla Farm, Judith Freeman takes us on a voyage both outward and within the soul; her characters are so fully realized, the landscape so vivid, the prose so fine, that A Desert of Pure Feeling lives on long after you reach the end."
-- Abraham Verghese

About the Author

Judith Freeman is the author of three novels–The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, and A Desert of Pure Feeling–and of Family Attractions, a collection of stories. She lives in California.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679752714
• ISBN 13: 9780679752714
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288