cover image The Piper's Song

The Piper's Song

Sesyle Joslin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $16.95 (266pp) ISBN 978-0-15-171977-8

When Simon, her British lover, dies after a prolonged coma in a Roman hospital managed by French nuns, Anna, an American novelist and screenwriter, is deeply grieved but not utterly bereft. She has the solace of her work, sustaining memories of better days with Simon romping through Cornwall, youth (she is 30) and buoyant health. Nor is she alone. There is her friendship with the lawyer Arturo, whose ""inchoate kisses'' brush her lips when he is not ``grazing'' in the hollow between her breasts, and there is her elderly cousin Alex, surrogate father and soon to become her ``paternal husband.'' And there is her own true (if forbidden) love for the irresistible nun Sister Clotilde, at once chastely innocent and fervently passionate. Their love, begun in a convent garden, is consummated in the Swiss Alps. Clotilde goes to Africa to care for starving children; Anna returns to New York, hoping to reassemble her sundered life. Joslin, the author of numerous children's books, tells her tale in an overwrought fashion that renders it cloying. (October 28)