Book Doctor; A Novel

New York: Counterpoint: A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2005. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. [8], 251, [3] pages. Signed and dated by the author on the title page. Esther Cohen is a novelist and poet living in New York City. She’s the author of several books, including Book Doctor. Everyone wants to write a book. Arlette Rosen loves books. She always has. She thinks she knows a good book from a bad one and believes that all writers should aim to be James Joyce, or Proust, or at least not forgotten too quickly. Enter Harbinger Singh. An unusual hero in a brown wool suit that doesn't quite fit, Harbinger Singh earns his living as a tax lawyer. He enjoys his job, making meticulous columns of numbers day in and day out, parsing people's lives into numbers. Still in love with his ex-wife, a public policy lawyer named Carla, Singh wants to win her back. And he also wants revenge. He decides the path back to Carla is through writing a book, maybe called Hot and Dusty (He'd be the heat, she'd be the dust). All he needs is help with the actual writing. Arlette Rosen and Harbinger Singh meet and enter each other's lives in unalterable ways, ways that form the unusual path Book Doctor takes. It is a path full of books, sex, movies, love, music, and continual revelation. Inspired by the frustrations of writer's block and the vagaries of modern romance, the result is a surprising combination of tremendous heart and urbane, sophisticated, mordantly funny storytelling. Smart, independent, quirky, and well-read, Arlette Rosen makes her living helping people write the books they've always dreamed of, and she's quite good at it. She likes this work, likes the freedom of someone else's sentences, likes being able to change, in intuitive ways only she knows, small details here and there. By the time she meets new client Harbinger Singh, she has worked on sixty-four books, chosen from hundreds of submissions. Harbinger Singh really wants to do is write a novel, a grand, sweeping saga he intends to call Hot and Dusty. While the romance that blooms between these two unlikely lovers is more about longing than lust, it triggers something in each that just might be called hope. With uncompromising wit and a fierce tenderness, Esther Cohen has written a modern-day comedy of manners about relationships, writer's block, and the enduring-if elusive-creative spirit. Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Arlette Rosen, Ghostwriter, Harbinger Singh, Love, Relationships, Authorship, Romance, Storytelling, Lawyer, Revenge, Writer's Block

ISBN: 1582433232

[Book #83091]

Price: $75.00

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