Sleeping in Flame

World Fantasy Award nominee 1989.

Jonathan Carroll's genius for wringing extraordinary magic from ordinary life has received high praise from writers and critics alike.... And now in Sleeping in Flame, his most brilliant and compelling novel yet, Carroll playfully turns life inside out and makes it abundantly clear that with dreams, myths, and imagination, anything, after all, is possible.

Walker Easterling is a retired actor and screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffees, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafés. When he falls in love with Maris York, an artistic and hauntingly beautiful model, his life begins to come alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre – he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past – so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.

At once lyrical, frightening, funny, and sexy, Sleeping in Flame confirms that Jonathan Carroll is one of the very few novelists who – by constantly surprising us – give us an entirely new perspective on our world. It is no wonder that he is generally considered to be the most original and provocative novelist of his generation.