Dirty Love (Paperback)

Staff Reviews

This is arguably the best book of many outstanding books I read in 2013. In each of the four stories that comprise this book, the characters struggle with joy and disappointment, temptation, expectation, guilt and shame; they want to believe in love but are just as eager to sabotage it and escape its complications to live a more predictable and controlled solitary life.

Dubus is a consummate master of prose and I recorded pages of passages that are short gems which speak volumes about the characters.

What I liked best though, is that the characters who are only mentioned in passing in one story become the central focus of another story. They seem marginal and uninteresting until Dubus tells their tales. The lesson that everyone has a story to tell, that everyone deals with love and loss and guilt and shame, that the world is a better place if we each remember that and treat one another with kindness and respect, is one we all should embrace. This book reinforced that lesson as few other books have done for me; I loved this book.