The Gargoyle

Andrew Davidson

Jun 2009 · Random House Canada

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

I had read the actual paper version of this book, but it is such an expertly crafted and told story that I had to let everyone who comes across it here know: never have characters been so perfectly fleshed out, built up, and executed better than this, and the story truly builds to a rising crescendo with every note along they way perfectly directed. Worth its weight in gold, you will do yourself a favour in reading this novel, if only to enjoy Davidson's fantastically sculpted prose.

An amazing book that starts lurid and nearly vulgar, hard and uncomfortable, and ascends to beautiful peaks of love and spirit. Full of story and wonder, pulling at your heart and mind. A must read for anyone who can accept the fact that a monster can see angels in Hell, and find redemption in the tattooed angel's wings on a schizophrenic sculptor who has loved him for hundreds of years.

One of my all time fav books! A must read!!

About the author

ANDREW DAVIDSON grew up in Pinawa, Manitoba, and graduated in 1995 from the University of British Columbia with a B.A. in English literature. He has worked as a teacher of English in Japan, where he has lived on and off since the late 1990s, and as a writer of English lessons for Japanese websites. The Gargoyle, the product of seven years’ worth of research and composition, is his first novel.