“Part Beauty and the Beast, part monk meditation, part pulse-galloping thriller, part Salingeresque coming-of-age with an untamable femme lead, part intoxicated art school sex party, part goldenrod glow the morning after a storm—this novel illuminates how we can rescue others by allowing our own rescue.”— Aimee Seu, Southeast Review

Read a conversation about the book from Ron Slate’s On The Seawall here.

Paradise Close
A Novel
Lisa Russ Spaar

In 1971, orphan Marlise Schade—fourteen, anorectic, and evicted from the psychiatric hospital her trust fund can no longer support—finds herself alone in an ancestral home during a blizzard. Marlise’s struggles to survive there become the focal point for a host of imperiled figures, living and dead, whose stories intersect with hers and with forces roiling the U.S. in the ’70s.

Decades later, sixty-something Tee Handel is shaken by an inexplicable visitation. For years he’s nursed a deep hurt over his breakup with a captivating artist, spending his days and nights in solitude tinkering with antique clocks. What’s become of the artist, and how Tee reacts to his mysterious guest, testifies to the risk and inexorability of change.

These two seemingly unrelated tales entwine to show how the wages of the past are always with us, as are the dangerous and redemptive consequences of secrets confided and withheld.

“Soulful, sexy, extraordinarily lyrical…. If this is what happens when poets write novels, they should all write them.”
—Eleanor Henderson

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Madrigalia, Orexia, Satin Cash, Vanitas, Rough, and Blue Venus, a collection of essays. She is the editor of several anthologies, including More Truly and More Strange. She is a poetry columnist for Los Angeles Review of Books and Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Hardcover / $25.95 (Can $34.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-551-2 / 232 pages / Fiction