The Soul Thief » (Bargain)

Of Charles Baxter's fiction, Ron Hanson wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Baxter's stories are intelligent, original, gracefully written, always moving, frequently funny and -- the rarest of compliments -- wise."

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes.

The Barnes & Noble Review

To have a soul is to have one in danger. For as long as the soul exists, it can be broken, banged up, traded in for a trifle. Beauty was always a gleaming bauble. "All dreams of the soul / End in a beautiful man's or woman's body," warned William Butler Yeats. It's a piece of wisdom that could make a fitting frontispiece for Charles Baxter's Soul Thief, too.