New York: William H. Morrow, (2004) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - In their review, the Washington Post described this novel by this award-winning writer as "at once a painting in prose, an investigation into artistic obsession and a re-evaluation. . . The story begins in England in the 1870s with that most unblushing and Victorian of opening gambits: a letter. One director of an insane asylum, Dr. Hoffmann, has written to another, Thomas Learmont, of the spontaneous combustion of a young woman in his care.. . it is the dead woman who will link the different times and locales in which Mortal Love is set. Reduced to ashes before the novel begins, then reincarnated as numerous women within it, she is the enigmatic object of quests ranging from Victorian England to an island off the coast of Maine in the 1980s, and from a remote coast in rural Cornwall to present-day London." SIGNED on the title page. 364 pp. ISBN: 0-061051705.