Robert Stone

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With soaring vision and profound intelligence, Robert Stone has written a harrowing, breathtaking novel about our desperate search, at any price, for the consolation of redemption – and about the people who are all too willing to provide it.

A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a mind-altering pilgrimage, a race through riot-filled Jerusalem streets, a cat-and-mouse game in an underground maze, a desperate attempt to prevent a bomb from detonating beneath the Temple Mount – Damascus Gate is an exhilarating journey through the moral and religious ambiguities that haunt the holiest of cities and its seekers, cynics, hustlers, and madmen.

Set in Jerusalem, where violence, ecstasy, heresy, and salvation are all to be found, Damascus Gate is simultaneously the story of a man's search for truth – or some version of it – and the story of a city where sanity is casually traded for faith. Christopher Lucas – expatriate American journalist, lapsed Catholic, half Jewish, skeptical and searching – is between jobs, adrift amid the multitude who seem to require the proximity of faith, if not the real thing. With his lack of faith and vague identity, Lucas is this city's invisible man until a new assignment draws him into the depravity and duplicity on both sides of the supposedly sacred struggle. His investigation of religious lunatics who have fallen victim to "Jerusalem Syndrome" leads him to Sonia, a beautiful Sufi and nightclub singer; old Adam De Kuff, an unstable Jewish guru and instrument of redemption; Razz Melker, a strung-out, misguided apostle who foists De Kuff into the role of messiah and who becomes a willing pawn in a dangerous game; and Jan Zimmer, a soldier of fortune who routinely – and for the right price – places himself at the center of the world's next flashpoint.

Throughout his long and respected literary career, Robert Stone has created truly memorable, if deeply flawed, characters who are forced to face ultimate questions: What is the price of loyalty, of betrayal, of faith? For the people in his novels, these are questions of life and death. Damascus Gate is Stone's finest, most ambitious work, a passionate, humorous, and knowing book about the search for God, power, salvation, and apocalypse.

"Here is our masterpiece writer, Robert Stone, writing his book of books, his millennial novel of the millennial place . . . Here are Stone's most magnified, vivid, lunatic, and tender characters . . . Damascus Gate is a narrative of good and evil written in letters of fire."

—Annie Dillard

"An astonishing and thrilling novel. Varieties of Religious Experience for the millennium. By turns scary,funny, and deeply moving. Prose at such a high pitch it sometimes seems hallucinatory. Stone is a genius."

—Frank Conroy

"Robert Stone is that rare thing, a novelist who goes straight to the heart of the modern inferno. In Damascus Gate he has journeyed to one of the inner circles and come back to bear witness. A frightening, grim, invigorating work."

—John Banville

"Robert Stone is an explorer who takes his readers to the fractured edges of the known world. Damascus Gate is a triumph, Stone at the height of his powers."

—Ward Just

Robert Stone is the author of A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, and Outerbridge Reach. He won the National Book Award for Dog Soldiers and the Faulkner Foundation Award for his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors. He lives with his wife in Connecticut.

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