A Mouth Like Yours — Daniel Duane

A brutally honest novel about love and illusion from the author of Caught Inside

Cassius Harper, ambivalent child of the seventies, is leading a modest and respectable life in San Francisco's flush nineties: he has a promising doctoral thesis, a doting new lover, the company of old friends and adoring parents, even a rent-controlled apartment by the beach where he's surfed all his life. So why the upwelling of nameless dread? Why the regret after cocktail parties and the road rage and, worst of all, the certainty that he is somehow a stranger to himself? Harper has always seen transformative love as the heart's salvation; but he's found his elusive ideal only twice, with miserable consequences. A Mouth Like Yours tells of a third and grand collision, with the vulnerable, volatile, and addictive Joanie Artois.

So quickly does Harper lose himself in Joanie, so thoroughly does she colonize his heart, that he sets out to understand why, exactly, love always unmans him this way. Exploring what carnal love can do for us and what it cannot, A Mouth Like Yours is a poignant statement about the growing pains of a generation.