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by Thomas Fox Parry (Author)
Danzig, 1880. Józef Nowak is an ex-monk and ex-soldier in love and in lust with a barmaid named Klara, a woman who, in addition to being already married and decades his senior, is prey to ecstatic visions, one of which Józef shares: a luminous heart floating over a hill. Love unrequited, Józef would be happy enough to suffer in his own bewildered way, but after his latest vocation as a transatlantic engine stoker ends in injury and bloodshed, he finds himself washed up in America, in Philadelphia, bereft. That is, until the scion of shipping fortune, one Mister Persson, tells him that Klara, too, has come to America and since disappeared. So Józef dives into a new world, south and then west, chasing the shadow of Klara into the desert and to the edge of Sonora, Mexico. Hindered by pilgrims of ill-intent, and aided by a single friend, Doctor Davidson, a dopehead and a devotee of the enigmatic, can Józef hope to find Klara? And if he does, will he find a seer, a saint, or a madwoman? Is Klara foretold in the savage, back pages of the Bible? Will Józef's habit of failure leave him blood-encrusted, destroyed, and beyond all meaning? Find out in Józef Nowak's own account, The Holy Infant, a manuscript salvaged from a forgotten archive. Whether of fevered madness or revelation, Nowak's yarn is, at minimum, as he himself claimed, "The weird and thrilling narrative of a lost man."
