[.ca] Sparrow Nights (ISBN 067931184X)

Amazon.ca:
"Let me come back, just for a second, to Emma Carpenter." So begins Sparrow Nights, David Gilmour's spine-tingling novel of obsessive love. And in confidential asides and spiralling digressions, Darius Holloway makes sure that he does get back to Emma again and again. Darius is a man of exquisite taste: a lover of fine restaurants, expensive wines, and beautiful women, who relishes the serenity of his job as a professor of French literature. At 51, he considers himself happy--that is, until he lets a waifish young student get under his skin. According to Darius, the stunning, sexually insatiable Emma blasted into his tidy middle-aged life for two years, only to leave empty hangers clinking in his closet and the "sparrows" of insomnia picking at his brain. At first, Darius thinks he's getting over Emma. Women find his melancholic emaciation oddly attractive, and he discovers other compensations for her absence. But it isn't long before a nightly cocktail of booze, pills, illicit sex, and jealous fantasies tips the good professor over the edge. Gilmour's portrayal of the self-serving Darius (who admits just enough to make you wonder if Emma didn't have good cause to run away) is eerily nuanced and laced with black humour, and his metaphors linger like the smell of cigarette smoke long after Sparrow Nights reaches its unexpected denouement. If your tastes run to film noir and literary thrillers such as Ian MacEwan's Enduring Love, you won't be able to put this book down. --Lisa Alward

Sparrow novel:
I am impressed by Gilmour's work here. He does an excellent job at expressing the emotions one would explain if our heart or the person that we so entwine with our selves leaves us. This novel shows how one person deals with this universally experienced scenario. The shortcoming for me was that there is no completeness to this novel. The novel starts with showing how classy our professor is and it shows his decline into something definitely less than the persona he so cherished about himself. The ending how ever does not really pursue or finish pursue any of the themes raised in the earlier parts of the novel. The professor is just left hanging in the middle of his dilemma.