Vernal Thaw A novel of love at a slant

Vernal Thaw: A Novel of Love at a Slant traces the entangling and unraveling of a queer relationship through love and tumult over the course of a year in Vermont. Franky, a young adjunct professor haunted by encounters with violent men, falls into an intense relationship with Vera, an older neurosurgeon shaped by a childhood in homophobic Soviet-era Ukraine. As they attempt to build a life together, their shared desire snags on unhealed wounds. An ambiguous darkness drifts between literature, dreams, and reality—ghostly forms beneath the ice, a midwinter house flood, the death of a mutual friend, secret longings—testing the tenuous intimacy between Franky and Vera.

TROUBLING AND DELICIOUS
—Daisy Hildyard, author of Hunters in the Snow, The Second Body, and Emergency

With candid prose and warm, precise emotional intelligence, Frances Cannon crafts an immersive novel about the mythic, shapeshifting nature of intimacy and the patterns of violence that linger in the landscape of home and memory, all too often awaiting a single unwary step.
—Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere and Mad Eden

 Vernal Thaw is at once sexy, erotic, and poignant: a queer pleasure at the breaking point of romance and tragedy. Let Cannon’s wit absorb you into the minds of women-in-their rage, lovers-in-their-desires, and friends-in-their-heartbreaks, for this is surely a novel that captivates our inner lusts. Vernal Thaw is an absolute must read.  
—Orchid Tierney, author of this abattoir is a college.

VERNAL THAW is chilling, tender, and alive. It is an otherworldly fable set in the real world, revealing the indelible and sometimes deadly paradox of human love: that it is those to whom we are closest whose true natures most escape us—often until it is too late.
—Lucy Ives, author of An Image of My Name Enters America.