Achingly sad and beautifully crafted, The All Saints' Day Lovers is a remarkable and intense exploration of relationships, loneliness and cruelty. Set in the starkly beautiful landscape of Belgium's Ardennes, these seven stories of lives in crisis have been compared to Flaubert, Dickens, Maupassant, Perec, Antonio Tabucchi and Raymond Carver. But, as one Italian reviewer said, in these 'stories there is a secret hope that escapes the American writer'.
A Colombian writer is witness to a murder which does not affect him, but which will mark him forever. Michelle sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return from an expedition to find wood for their stove, while he lies in bed twenty kilometres away, unable to heal the wound in his own marriage, trying to comfort the young widow who served him in a diner. The blood-soaked betrayal of a hunter has far-reaching consequences for Xavier and his aged dog. A young man in Paris persuades his ex-girlfriend to visit his ailing alcoholic father. A love affair and a murder led to Madame Michaud's thirty-nine year prison sentence; her release grants her younger sister the chance for long-meditated revenge.
Quoting Tobias Wolff with approval in his afterword - 'A collection of stories should be like a novel in which the characters do not know each other' - Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality and landscape with these fragmented lives.
