"There are books with front doors, through which the reader walks right in, and there are books with side doors. Side door books take more interpretive work, but yield special pleasures. Jamie Quatro's fantastic new novel, Fire Sermon, is a side door book. The novel delivers its story through a variety of methods: first-person confessions, "fictional" third-person descriptions, letters sent and unsent, emails, questionnaires, Socratic dialogues with the self. Roiling, raw and sensual on the surface, this mazy novel rewards a second reading... The sentences burn with desire and disquiet. The novel is generously condensed, ardently focused, its mechanisms poetic, not expository. In fact, although it is fiction, Fire Sermon reminds me most of confessional poetry, the aim of which is uncompromising honesty and self-exposure. .. You may enter this book through an interest in poetry or theology, but once you are there, it shows you more."-Amity Gaige, New York Times Book Review

"Quatro's novel, full of vivid, mercurial prose, breathes new life into the subject and sets it gloriously ablaze."-Claire Luchette, O Magazine

"Nothing on Earth has ever not been about the passage of time - not a film, a poem, a cave painting, a house, a poncho, a comic book, a snowman or a fugue. But some art is particularly obsessed....Jamie Quatro, in her very sad first novel, Fire Sermon, squeezes large flows of time into a book as thin as my little finger. Time haunts every sentence.... The reader is left to intuit all the life those numbers once contained - the people who lived then, the children who memorized the numbers, the parents who helped them do the memorizing. And then of course we think of our own number, and what it might mean to someone who might memorize it someday, and what it feels like, right now, to be inside of it: 2018."-Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

"Charged with erotic energy and an almost mystical yearning, Jamie Quatro's debut novel, Fire Sermon (Grove Atlantic), is a tour de force exploration of lust, marriage, longing, and love. ... exploring the tensions that play out when heightened sexual desire, intellectual frisson, and having one's beliefs tested meet the quotidian routines and rewards of work, family, and faith. ... Incorporating a mix of narrative styles from epistolary to confessional to flashback, Fire Sermon is a virtuosic portrait of flesh-and-blood sensuality and the mystery of salvation." -Lisa Shea, ELLE

"Five years on and in her incendiary first novel, Fire Sermon, Quatro introduces another female protagonist and deals with the same burning issues of faith and faithlessness, only this time with greater scrutiny and intensity and with more miraculous results...As with Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Fire Sermon examines infidelity by deftly balancing the sexual and the spiritual. There is agony and ecstasy, and the tantalizing hope of redemption through confession. All is rendered with fierce intelligence and lyrical grace. Passionate and intimate, few first novels are so adept at tracking 'the guiltiest swervings of the weaving heart.'"-Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Adultery may be a tale as old as time, but Quatro's take is freshly urgent, as she grapples with themes of desire, sin, commitment, guilt and renunciation while writing frankly about both marital and extramarital sex."-San Francisco Chronicle

"Fire Sermon offers a radical, transformative vision of the intersection between faith and desire. It is a book that takes sin seriously-and compels readers to see how