LOVE

Many women are obsessed by Bill Cosey, owner of the Cosey Hotel and resort. More than just the owner, he shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian and friend. Even after his death he dominates their lives. Yet he was driven by secret forces. Forty years on, the hotel is boarded up and the resort half under water, but Christine and Heed, old women now, bound together by a lifetime of jealousy and pain, are still the Cosey girls, ''as different as honey and soot'', when Junior comes walking down the street and into their lives, in her short skirts and high boots and with a look in her eye- This audacious vision from a master storyteller of the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread - is shocking and moving in its profound understanding of love''s ambivalence, and of how alive the past can be. It peels back the layers to reflect the different facets of love, shifting from desire through sex, lust, obsession, yearning, and ultimately full circle to the power of a girl''s first love that marks her forever. And the only one who sees the whole picture is L (whose full name is revealed only near the end - a word mentioned only once in the whole of this novel), who has more to do with the outcome than anyone knows.