Kelly Link - The Book of Love - Inky Phoenix

The Book of Love

Kelly Link

Random House, hb., 640 pp

The March 2024 pick from the Inky Phoenix, the book club from internationally known yoga teacher, author, and Charleston resident Kathryn Budig.

Blue Bicycle Books is proud to be the official bookstore partner of the Inky Phoenix!

About the book:

Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom one year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are.

In the room with them is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of a bargain their teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers.

But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agenda. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura's sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos. It becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster.

Welcome to Kelly Link’s incomparable Lovesend, where you’ll encounter love and loss, laughter and dread, magic and karaoke, and some really good pizza.

About the author:

Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the owner of Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.

Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her family, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.