God and Sex

A struggling new age author’s brush with a forest fire sends him in search of help from a higher power in this resonant drama from Raymond (Denial). At 41, Arthur Zinn has seen better days. He recently released his fourth book to critical pans and tepid sales, forcing him to relocate to his mother’s vacant house in bucolic Oregon. He’s banking his comeback on a new ecology-informed book about trees, inspired by his impassioned belief that Earth is on a “death spiral” resulting from deforestation. Arthur befriends Phil French, a forest ecologist at the local university, but his research is derailed upon meeting and becoming instantly smitten with Phil’s wife, Sarah, a tall and slender librarian. They embark on a series of secret trysts before she leaves for a retreat on Mount Hood. Wracked with guilt and still hung up on her, Arthur sets out to visit her. A forest fire rages upon his arrival, and there’s no sign of Sarah. He begins desperately praying and tries to convince himself that he’d “feel it if anything was wrong.” Disastrous events and surprising twists ensue, testing Arthur’s sense of reality and the divine, as Raymond drives this potent gut-punch of a novel to its emotional conclusion. Readers will be floored. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Aug.)