Love Maps

"Who can plot the turns and reversals of the heart? Who can follow its illogical loyalties and mysterious obsessions? Who can reconcile its competing claims from lovers and family? Eliza Factor, that's who, in this stunningly assured novel about a pair of sisters--one a successful artist, the other [...]
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"Who can plot the turns and reversals of the heart? Who can follow its illogical loyalties and mysterious obsessions? Who can reconcile its competing claims from lovers and family? Eliza Factor, that's who, in this stunningly assured novel about a pair of sisters--one a successful artist, the other a famous singer--and the handsome architect who comes between them. The cover should come with a warning to put your life on hold for a few days, because once you pick it up, you won't be able to do anything else until you finish."
--Bliss Broyard, author of "One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life--A Story of Race and Family Secrets"
"Eliza Factor's second novel is a beautiful and uplifting journey through the New York art scene of the 1980s, as lived by one true artist. You'll be hard-pressed to find a character more fully and honestly revealed across the pages of a book than Sarah Marker. A stunning and original exploration of family, romantic love, and the possibility of healing."
--Joseph Weisberg, creator/executive producer of "The Americans" (FX Network)
"By turns lyrical and flinty, searching and suspenseful, "Love Maps" is animated by the strivings and travails of characters who seek (and find) the real and the true, the territory instead of the map."
--Thad Ziolkowski, author of "Wichita"
"Eliza Factor's "Love Maps" is a delight, and I read it with mounting pleasure and admiration. It feels strange to think of "Love Maps" as a pleasure--this is, after all, a book that captures in technicolor detail the pain and vulnerability that come with just about every variety of human relationship. But prose this witty and psychologically deft, and structures this intricate and heartbreaking, don't come around often."
--Ben Dolnick, author of "At the Bottom of Everything"
"The tone and tension in "Love Maps" is expertly drawn. Between sisters and lovers, artists and architects, mothers and sons, and--of all things--people and ashes, Eliza Factor has managed to tell the truest kind of story: about the inconvenience of love, and the choices people make when they're most afraid."
--Amanda Stern, author of "The Long Haul"
The love in "Love Maps" is not the kind associated with domestic bliss; it is the kind that bubbles up at inopportune moments, attaching itself to people who might be better off free, causing mayhem and longing, along with moments of rare beauty. The title is taken from a series of paintings by Sarah Marker, an artist who ekes out a living teaching humanities at a fancy high school in Connecticut.
The story begins when Sarah receives a letter from Philip, her erstwhile husband. They have lived separately for seven years, without having seen each other once, without having formally severed ties, in a state of sustained ambivalence. Now he wants to visit. As much as Sarah would like to see him, she is terrified at what he will do when he discovers that he has a son.
Sarah bundles up her son and once again takes flight, only to arrive in a place she had not intended. While navigating the terrain of the 1980s art scene in New York City, she must confront the terrible events surrounding Philip's departure, and reconcile the expectations of domestic life with her own fractured experience of family, confronting the violence and aching love at the heart of this story.