“Eliza Factor’s second novel is a beautiful and uplifting journey through the New York arts scene of the 1980’s, as lived by one true artist. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a character more fully and honestly revealed across the pages of a book than Sarah Marker. A stunning and original exploration of family, romantic love, and the possibility of healing.”
–Joseph Weisberg, creator and executive producer of The Americans
Read an excerpt in The Nervous Breakdown. Buy it at Amazon or directly from Akashic.
Me, You, and Books: “A wonderful novel about a woman caught between her dynamic sister and her husband; an exciting book about love, pain, and the possibility of forgiveness.”
“A heartbreaking act of violence destroys the two relationships one woman holds most dear in this powerfully written second novel from Factor. Sarah Marker was an artist on the cusp of recognition, and deeply in love, when her life took a shocking turn. Eight years later she is a struggling, solitary single mother teaching at a small private school in Connecticut, with her canvases, paints, and brushes gathering dust in a dank basement. How she got there—and why the arrival of a letter from her long-estranged husband pushes her first into an emotionally charged reverie and then a panic-fueled plan to flee her home—is slowly, tantalizingly revealed by Factor, who flips the action between 1980s New York City and Sarah’s present day in 1997. Overshadowed by her emotionally manipulative sister and their peripatetic upbringing, Sarah undertakes a cautious search for love and identity. Factor reveals this arresting tale through solid character development and a well-paced narrative. From its tense opening chapter to its memorable conclusion, this is a read-in-one-sitting trip.”–Publisher’s Weekly
“Put your life on hold for a few days, because once you pick up Love Maps, you won’t be able to do anything else until you finish.”
–Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop, A Story of Race and Family Secrets
“By turns lyrical and flinty, searching and suspenseful, Love Maps is animated by the strivings and travails of characters who seek (and find) the real and the true, the territory instead of the map.”
–Thad Ziolkowski, author of Wichita
“Eliza Factor’s Love Maps is a delight, and I read it with mounting pleasure and admiration. It feels strange to think of Love Maps as a pleasure–this is, after all, a book that captures in Technicolor detail the pain and vulnerability that come with just about every variety of human relationship. But prose this witty and psychologically deft, and structures this intricate, don’t come around often.”
–Ben Dolnick, author of At the Bottom of Everything
“The tone and tension in Love Maps is expertly drawn. Between sisters and lovers, artists and architects, mothers and sons, and–of all things–people and ashes, Eliza Factor has managed to tell the truest kind of story: about the inconvenience of love, and the choices people make when they are most afraid.”
–Amanda Stern, author of The Long Haul