Raymond and Hannah

A nine-month trip to Jerusalem to study the Torah is about to begin for 20-something Hannah when fate introduces her to Raymond one week before her departure. A Gentile English literature doctoral candidate, he is attracted to Hannah at once, and what launches as a passionate one-night tryst morphs into a full-scale global love affair, with email and telephone exchanges building the relationship's momentum. Kathleen McInerney and David Ledoux's hip, melodic, and angst-ridden performances paint the backdrop for what can only be described as a torturous long-distance relationship. The narration provides insight into a relationship composed of tenuous devotion, religious variance, and sexual attraction. B.J.P. 2006 Audie Award Winner (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

April 4, 2005
In his startling debut, Marche offers up a rare hybrid: the page-turner prose poem. Raymond and Hannah meet at a party in Toronto, and what might have been a one-night stand blossoms into something more enduring. In lyrical paragraphs labeled in the margins (e.g., "Lost virginities"), Marche maps out their five-day love affair with bursts of confession, philosophical musing and notes on the infinitesimal shifts of mood between kisses. On Raymond and Hannah's second day together, "The afternoon is a labyrinthine flex of joints twisted around each other in a variety of blisses." But at the end of the week, Hannah leaves Canada and her WASPy lover for a previously scheduled nine-month stay in Jerusalem. Their e-mail exchanges about their respective cities and pursuits—Raymond is writing a doctoral dissertation on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
while Hannah studies Torah at an Orthodox yeshiva—don't necessarily forward the plot, but rather reveal how little two people can really tell each other. In between their letters, the novel offers utterly convincing glimpses of both characters' lives. Especially full-bodied is the evocation of Hannah's struggle to understand her Jewish identity, not just through study but through the city of Jerusalem itself. In this lushly romantic book, love between Jew and atheist gentile resembles the divided city, simultaneously impossible and actual. Agent, Jacqueline Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto).