The Gargoyle - Tapa dura

The Gargoyle is purely and simply an amazement, a riot, a blast. It's hard to believe that this is Andrew Davidson's first novel: he barrels out of the chute with the narrative brio and confidence, not to mention the courage, of a seasoned master. This book plucks the reader off the ground and whirls her through the air until she shouts from sheer abandonment and joy. What a great, grand treat. * * Peter Straub * * I was blown away by Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle. It reminded me of Life of Pi, with its unanswered (and unanswerable) contradictions. A hypnotic, horrifying, astonishing novel that manages, against all odds, to be redemptive. * * Sara Gruen, author of WATER FOR ELEPHANTS * * there's a palpable fizz to the prose -- Stuart Evers * * Word magazine * * The Gargoyle has a big personality: it is serious and daft, quiet and exhuberant, a novel that makes you think and an exotic adventure. Above all, it is the work of a talented and imaginative new writer. -- Simon Baker * * The Daily Telegraph * * Davidson spins a world so expansive and magically realised that it is heart-rending to return to the real one. His meticulously researched and abundantly emotional tome is a momentous debut that can't go on too long. -- Suzanne Black * * The List * *

Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. The nameless and beautiful narrator of The Gargoyle is driving along a dark road when he is distracted by what seems to be a flight of arrows. He crashes into a ravine and wakes up in a burns ward, undergoing the tortures of the damned. His life is over - he is now a monster. But in fact it is only just beginning. One day, Marianne Engel, a wild and compelling sculptress of gargoyles, enters his life and tells him that they were once lovers in medieval Germany. In her telling, he was a badly burned mercenary and she was a nun and a scribe who nursed him back to health in the famed monastery of Engelthal. As she spins her tale, Scheherazade fashion, and relates equally mesmerising stories of deathless love in Japan, Greenland, Italy and England, he finds himself drawn back to life - and, finally, to love.