This brilliant, dazzling story collection shatters then transforms every idea you’ve ever had about love.

In story after story, Glover dissects the human heart, and in the darkest corners, he finds evidence of life. Best friends fall in love with the same woman over and over again. A serial killer finds a wife. A Proust scholar starts an adulterous affair and moves into a rental storage unit. A boy falls hopelessly and pathologically in love with his babysitter. Lovers travel in time. A new Ice Age begins. An ancient language dies. Page after page overflow with the vagaries of lust, the lure of novelty, the perils of infidelity, and the destructive and redemptive nature of passion.

Absurd, comic, dream-like, and deeply affecting (on the molecular level), Savage Love confirms Douglas Glover as the most adventurous story writer this country has ever witnessed.

“An exciting and unpredictable collection by a true virtuoso.”
– Toronto Star

“Glover’s collection is bracing, angry, violent and funny. It is, regardless of genre, one of the best books you will read this year.”
– National Post

“Stories as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature.”
– Los Angeles Review of Books

“Glover writes the best way possible: fiercely, idiosyncratically and lovingly…. Douglas Glover, the mad genius of CanLit.”
– Globe and Mail

“Glover’s œuvre…demands comparison to McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner. He challenges readers to enter winding caves of mystery, not in search of answers, but in search of experience.”
– Music and Literature

“Love as you have never seen it before.”
– Chatelaine

“Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in… By any measure, Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year.”
– Quill & Quire

“Not for the timid, this gut-wrenching collection of physically and emotionally charged fiction lives up to the outstanding reputation that Glover has attained. His distinctive voice may echo into the next century and beyond.”
– ForeWord

“Savage Love provides more evidence: nobody alive constructs more perfect stories than Douglas Glover. His art is exquisite, conclusive, stainless — but also wide-awake and breathing. That is to say, he’s no mere craftsman. In Savage Love, he manages somehow to be both Geppetto and the magic life-giving kiss.”
“What unifies this collection is the characteristic excellence of Douglas Glover’s prose. Otherwise the books is hugely, even shockingly varied in its narrative strategies, its settings, its tones, and its characters, who range from broadly comic figures to a killer so warped by war that he makes the psychotic Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian look benign. This book is urgent, ardent, obsessive, and remarkable.”
“I, your admiring reader, report myself ever again restored to find in hand the company of your righteous sentences, shout hooray, shout hooray, even splendid, splendid, splendid (borrowing from the great poet Jack Gilbert), like loins, he wrote, like Rome, he wrote…. “
“The stories in Savage Love…were a revelation…relieved by moments of sardonic humour, as well as by the skill with which the stories are told…. If you have not read Douglas Glover before, I recommend you do.”
– therecord.com

“[S]urprising, shattering, wickedly absurd tales rife with parenthetical, fourth-wall-breaking asides and understated cynicism… Savage Love remains one of the strongest, most refreshing short fiction collections of 2013.”
– Shortlisted

“Douglas Glover always pushes the envelope. Every story in Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce #&8212; and something beautiful — out of human foibles…. Some paragraphs are so gorgeously vivid, I wanted to read them twice…. This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging.”
– Now

“Glover’s sentences pulse and breathe, seethe and spit; his stories avoid prefab emotion in favour of bracing, often brutal honesty. For the courageous, there was no better collection of stories pubilshed this year.”
– Quill & Quire, Books of the Year

“Savage Love by Douglas Glover is a perfect collection of short stories for people knowing the world isn’t a fairy tale. The stories are rough and frank but brutally honest about the concept of human relations.”
– inkwellblogspot.ca

“One of Canada’s best writers, Glover returns with a brilliant story collection displaying his considerable range and remarkably varied writerly gifts.” — The Globe Books 100: Best Canadian fiction
– Globe and Mail

“A Douglas Glover short story is like a 10-day journey by Soviet-era jeep over a nation’s back roads — head-spinning and breathtaking. Its outcome is enlightening, sickening or utterly confusing, depending on which country he’s taken you to…. The best stories in Savage Love…inspire you to seize love by the heart and genitals, consequences be damned…. The frenetic chaos of Glover’s writing gets richer as the stories go on, taking us deeper into the desires that fuel love in all its perversions.”
– Atlantic Books Today

“[A] compact gallery, flint-eyed and snaggle-toothed, of wolfish behaviour; it’s also a casebook study in narrative design…the stories smoulder and luminesce with vitiated heat, modulated light….For all its antic form and interpersonal dysfunction, Savage Love remains somehow low key: a quietly virtuosic, artistically backward-looking story collection. Both eclectic and obsessive, abrasive and majestic, it might also be the best novel written anywhere this year….Savage Love is Glover’s fifth collection of short stories, and it confirms his longstanding mastery of the genre.”
– lareviewofbooks.org