So This Is Love — Gilbert Reid

Adroitly capturing love and all its nuances, So This Is Love pulsates with underlying currents of violence, sex, passion, and the politics of desire. Tracing the globe, individuals find themselves caught in the entanglements of memory, forgetting, and the imminent future.

In an overcrowded hospital in war-torn Bosnia, a Muslim soldier and a young Serbian woman---one crippled, the other blind---find solace in each other. In small-town Ontario, a father and daughter relive the summer when an ethereal girl entered their lives and a brutal assault changed everything. In an apartment peopled with an eclectic mix of bohemian expatriates, a man pursues a young suicidal waif at the height of the sexual revolution in 1970s Paris. So this is love.

In sparkling, insightful prose, Gilbert Reid's provocative debut collection of short stories takes the reader on a journey through war zones, bohemian apartments, idyllic rural farms, and the dark streets of Rome. Madly romantic, subtly subversive, and utterly accomplished, So This Is Love is at times morose, at times perverse, at times beautiful, but always honest.