Love and Other Delusions by Larry Baker

Ice Cube Press (est 1993) is pleased to announce the May 1, 2012, release of Love and Other Delusions, the first novel in their new fiction imprint, Ice Tea Books. 

The Author:

Love and Other Delusions is the fourth novel of award-winning writer Larry Baker. His first Florida novel, The Flamingo Rising, was a Barnes and Noble top-three finalist in the “Great New Voices” competition of 1997, a Los Angeles Times "Top 100" novel for 1997, and was adapted by Hallmark for a television movie in 2001. 

It was also included in the American Library Association’s “Banned Books” list for 2010. His last Florida novel A Good Man was a Southern Independent Bookseller Association nominee for the Book of the Year in 2010.

The Story: 

In Alice’s world, it all made sense. She told her husband, “I stopped cheating on you when I started sleeping with Danny.” 

He finally understood, but too late. 

Alice Marcher is dying, but she is still trying to understand her life. She was thirty when she met Danny Shay. He was eighteen. Two years later, they were sleeping together. Twenty years later, they parted. Alice insisted, “It lasted so long, so it must have meant something, right? We weren’t a cliché, were we?” 

Katherine Arnett is Alice’s audience, or therapist, or ghost. Only when Alice dies is Katherine’s true identity revealed. The two women share a final moment in a room with a man who simply asks, “Who are you?” Only one woman knows the answer.

“A story came back to her as she died, fiction as real as her own life, and she herself finally understood it. A beast in a jungle had always been there for her, all those years with Danny. Her own incarnation of that beast, its breath finally upon her throat, had finally turned on her. She had done a very bad thing, falling in love with Danny, and the beast had always been waiting.”---page 60 

Peter Bartram is Alice’s husband. He has always known.

Love and Other Delusions will be published in April 2012. It can be pre-ordered at Amazon.