Marcel Malone is a beautiful first novel that intersperses prose and poetry in the furtherance of a touching and engaging story of two lost souls whose exploration of the meaning and structure of words and memories brings unexpected confrontations and consequences.

It is a captivating odyssey of personal transformation through the experience and love of poetry. Psychologist Vera Lewis, troubled by her own hidden despair, prescribes a radical treatment for her patient, Marcel. Depressed by constant rejection, Marcel finds a source of comfort in writing poetry. While Vera succeeds in desensitizing Marcel to rejection, she becomes personally drawn to the unfamiliar world of poetry. Vera is able, through her growing knowledge and use of poetry, to uncover for Marcel the source of his difficulties.

As Marcel moves on with his life, Vera’s domestic problems worsen. Her newfound exploration and writing of poetry become her means of resolving the secrets of her past and visualizing for herself a better future. Her psychological descent and eventual emergence into a new life are strangely similar to the path taken by her former patient, Marcel.        

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Author Lew Watts was born and raised in Cardiff, Wales, and educated at the universities of Bristol and Reading, earning a First Class honors degree and Ph.D. in geology. After working in Europe, Scandinavia, the Middle East, and Africa, he moved to the United States in 2002. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and his first collection Lessons for Tangueros was published in 2011. He currently sits on a number of corporate boards, is a member of the governing board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and received an honorary doctorate in science from Bristol University in 2016. When not out fly-fishing, he lives in Chicago and Santa Fe with his wife, Roxanne Decyk.

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