Kingfisher

The narrator of this novel is a creative writing academic who becomes infatuated with a colleague, a poet. His partner, Michael, is handsome and dependable, a safe place to land. The poet is none of those things, and she seems to have everything he wants.

Their lives and their work could hardly differ more. He writes about steel and sex and keeps a careful eye on his growing career, while she writes about the flight of swallows from her large white house in the woods. As he moves back and forth between his established life and this new pull, his fixation deepens until the poet, whom he thinks of as his Kingfisher, fills his whole attention. He is entranced.

Then two illnesses strike at once and threaten the fragile reality he has been holding together. He is forced to ask what a person can and cannot take from someone else.

Kingfisher is a novel about grief, power and desire, and about the knotted spaces between them that make up a life.