On the streets and outskirts of Lowell, Massachusetts, three lives unfold, each shaped by longing, risk, and the weight of the past.
Misty survives on a highway off-ramp, reading palms and performing the tricks her mother taught her, while trapped in a dangerous relationship with Dean. When he enlists her in an extortion scheme against a city councilor, Misty is forced to confront the threat he poses to everything she holds dear. Grant tends his Christmas tree farm and maintains a quiet arrangement with his widowed neighbor, Pamela—until grief and longing intrude, disrupting the careful balance of their lives. Meanwhile, Billy interprets the world through his father’s fable: a lion who surrendered his teeth and claws for love, only to be destroyed by the vulnerability he offered.
Lion in Love interlaces these stories across a working-class cityscape, exploring how loneliness shapes desire, the risks we take for connection, and the price of loving without defenses. David Moloney’s second novel is a haunting, tender, and unflinching exploration of desire, danger, and the fragile courage required to survive intact in a world that tests the heart.
Praise for Lion in Love
“Set in the down and out streets of Lowell, Massachusetts, David Moloney’s mesmerizing new novel asks big questions about physical and spiritual resilience, about forgiveness and longing and the fleeting nature of love itself. Moloney is that rare writer whose work is as suffused with street smarts as it is a poetic sensibility, with a seemingly innate ability to enter with compassion and grace the psyches of his flawed and very human characters. He writes equally well from the point of view of a woman or a man, young or old, educated or uneducated. Why? Because David Moloney is a major American talent, and Lion in Love is a beauty.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog and Townie
“David Moloney’s remarkable new novel is brutal but compassionate, richly populated with characters fighting for their lives and souls. In tight, perfectly paced chapters, Moloney builds the story of an entire community hurtling towards disaster. I couldn’t look away.”
—Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Down Time
“Lion in Love is a powerful portrait of luckless lives derailed by hard times and harder choices. David Moloney has woven a taut web of menace, deception, and desperation, held together with thin but strong threads of love and hope.”
—Justin Taylor, author of Reboot
“Lion in Love offers an indelible portrait of contemporary Lowell—its townies and roughnecks, its new blood and old guard—that brims with quiet ferocity. The diverse lives that populate this novel are bound to one another for reasons beyond their ken; their collision course is artfully choreographed and told in taut, fine prose. David Moloney’s exactitude and compassion afford every one of his characters, no matter how desperate or misguided, a compelling measure of grace.”
—Gemma Sieff author of Dear Charlie
