UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWED
Valerie Martin
I seemed to be standing in a busy queue by the side of a long, mean street.
— from The Great Divorce
Most acclaimed
The Great Divorce
Divorce literal and metaphorical is the subject of Valerie Martin's magnificent new novel. As in the internationally acclaimed Mary Reilly, her retelling of the classic tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Great Divorce charts the territories of division - between humanity and nature and within the human psyche. Pulling together two distinct worlds - contemporary New Orleans and its antebellum counterpart - Valerie Martin explores the lives of three intriguing women, each possessed with mind and will, each struggling to remain whole as divisive forces threaten. At the novel's center is Ellen Clayton, a veterinarian at New Orleans's zoo, who fights to bring her family safely through the rupture of a crumbling marriage. Her departing husband, an historian in love with a younger woman, is researching the story of "The Catwoman of St. Francisville," the only white woman in Louisiana history hanged for murder: Elisabeth Boyer, a wealthy Creole beauty whose fatal marriage to an intolerant older man resulted in her captivity and, finally, his violent death. Elisabeth's legend finds an echo in Camille, a troubled young woman who works with the big cats at the zoo, and who finds herself caught in terrifyingly real fantasies of becoming one of them.
Property
Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.
Salvation
"Inspired by the fresco cycles that depict the life of St. Francis of Assisi, Valerie Martin tells the life of Francesco di Pietro Bernardone in a series of vividly realized "panels" of moments both ordinary and crucial: on the road, in the company of friends, alone in his meditations. She draws from myriad sources, including Francesco's own words, and has arranged these scenes thematically, in the manner of the early hagiographies, moving roughly backward in time.". "We begin with the dying Francesco and the rivalry for his body among the towns of medieval Italy. The old friar, exhausted by illness and the divisions within his brotherhood, gives way to the zealous missionary who joins the Fifth Crusade, confident that he can convert the Egyptian sultan. We see the unwashed and innocent revolutionary, unafraid to lecture a pope on Christ's message; his mystical friendship with Chiara di Offreducci, a nobleman's daughter who turns her back on the world to join him; and finally, the frivolous young Francesco on the deserted road where his encounter with a leper leads him to an ecstatic embrace of God.". "Salvation is at once a window into a medieval world whose physicality and purity have never been rendered with such visceral power, and a dazzlingly original portrait of the man whose legend has resonated through the centuries."--BOOK JACKET.