Tales of Burning Love: A Novel - Softcover

Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passion for women never survives the long haul. His first wife, June Kashpaw, dies in a snow bank just hours after their barroom wedding. The second, Eleanor, the clever, neurotic daughter of a circus acrobat and a funeral director, holds onto an unquenchable obsession for her erstwhile husband. Candice is a dentist whose tough business-like veneer hides her vulnerability and hate. The hardened, often unkind Marlis, a lounge singer, bears Jack's only child. And the current wife, Dot, guileless in her devotion, has married despite already having one husband in the state penitentiary.

These "tales of burning love," recounted with hindsight and irony, evince Jack's unconventional power to beguile and show how he was in many ways a different man with each wife. But even more, the women's narratives begin to reveal things about them that they have long kept private. As each opens her heart, she discovers and shares the secrets that sustain her love. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and at times often comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds the women together -- in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

Erdrich, with her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, brings these women's unforgettable stories to life with astonishing candor and warmth. Filled with keen perceptions about the apparatus for survival, the force of passion and the necessity of hope, Tales of Burning Love is a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.

Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passions never survive the long haul. Now, stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, they have come face-to-face—and each has an astonishing story to tell. Huddling for warmth, they pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry, and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and oftentimes comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together—in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.

With her characteristic powers of observation and luminescent prose, Louise Erdrich brings these women's unforgettable tales to life in a tour de force from one of the most formidable American writers at work today.