The Love of Impossible Sums

Description

Oliver has lost his wife Eden to illness. Still grieving three years later, unable or unwilling to imagine a future without her, he finds himself stuck in a joyless existence. But everything appears to change when on a bright December morning a stranger asks him for a light and then invites him to “They Them,” a poetry reading event by “a poet like no other.” The stranger is Alex, or They, and a ventriloquist’s dummy is Them, representing her dead husband Sam in a performance they had planned to do together. “Life is love and death,” They Them declare on stage.

Instantly drawn to each other by more than just their shared experience of loss, Oliver and Alex embark on a whirlwind romance. But tensions are being constantly stirred up by an ever-present cast of meddling characters, and as the strains of the present increase, the betrayals of a past full of lies and gratuitous disclosures soon begin to spill out and cause dangerous rifts…

A celebration of life and its many contradictions, The Love of Impossible Sums is a contemporary London tale of interlocking love stories, sexual indiscretions, and dysfunctional friendships. It explores the themes of love, loss, and the different ways people live their lives.

“Cacoyannis has a unique, pensive, and mournful literary style to be savored” —Publishers Weekly’s The BookLife Prize