Beauty

Beauty is the story of a lonely writer who secludes herself in a remote northern wilderness to care for injured wildlife. When a fellow researcher -- an arrogant, instinctual, and fiercely independent hunter and tracker -- begins to encounter her on secret trails, his animal nature draws her into a sudden obsession that takes her by surprise. Though he becomes her lover, he remains ever elusive and invulnerable to deep emotion. Just as she seeks the trust of the wounded birds of prey she handles -- trying to be gentler or braver, trying to disappear -- she practices stalking a man's secret heart. Now she must question her place in nature, facing the strange truth in her lover's contempt for compassion and his inflexible belief in the cold laws of survival. She must learn how to kill one animal to feed another, in order to understand in her body the surrender that true love requires.

Beauty is at once a sensual love story and the path of a woman's quiet empowerment. It explores humanity's many relationships with the rest of the living world and an artist's changing relationship with reality. Both a story and a poem, Beauty carries the reader through a fluid spiral of intimate moments -- our most familiar longings expressed in the intuitive language of the natural world.