Book Description

Love Bites is a collection of thirteen stories set in Europe and North America. They trace foreigners, drifters and eccentrics linked by their need for acknowledgment and belonging. How do these characters survive physically and psychologically on unfamiliar ground whether as tourists, or strangers in new cities or in new situations which jolt them out of the security of the familiar? Recurring themes are of isolation, loss, and a desire for connection when strangers reach out to other strangers for stability. A mysterious older woman and an alienated foreigner lost on a crowded London street, bond in their search for home. A single woman consults a soothsayer in London about family problems before he lures her into his own conflict. An acting student steps into a dusty music hall past when she auditions for ‘the star-maker’. A former life model and her overgrown son prey on a Canadian tourist in a Parisian garden. Interconnected scenes in Montreal, Paris and Toronto are linked by bizarre accidents and those who witness them. An elementary school boy, fascinated by his elderly neighbor, adopts the Candyman as an absent father. A woman, left by her partner in Paris wakes up with a phantom appendage and wanders Paris as a hermaphrodite. A honeymooning couple, marooned on a remote Hawaiian island, is forced to strip for their survival. An expat escapes into a new life in Paris until her ex-boyfriend reappears, reminding her of the impact of loss. An elderly woman, suffering from dementia is nearly eaten to death by her beloved pets running rampant in her home. Love Bites reveals a kaleidoscope of human experience wherein the reader is enticed into tales of everyday exiles, witnesses, and saviors. Despite emotional or geographical displacement, the characters in this collection all have one thing in common: their need to find home.