A Love Supreme

David E. Kemp, a former professor of drama at Queen’s University, is
the author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Kent Nussey is the author of two previous collections of short stories,
In Christ There Is No East or West (1993) and The War in Heaven (1997).
His fiction and essays have been published in literary journals and
magazines across North America.

A Love Supreme takes its title from John Coltrane’s most significant
album. (The tenor saxophonist had just overcome a decade of drug and
alcohol abuse; “his album A Love Supreme celebrated this victory and
the profound religious experience associated with it”). Nussey’s
novel chronicles the attempts of musicologist Omar Snow to write a book
of biographies of jazz icons Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus, and John
Coltrane. When Snow gets to the section on Coltrane, the aspiring
biographer experiences a series of ecstatic visions that force him to
follow a line of inquiry in his book very different from the one he
originally planned. As he seeks to capture the nature of the mystery and
wonder engendered by the music he is listening to, Snow’s writing
becomes increasingly metaphysical. His meditation on music and solitude
is complemented by a believable love story.

Brimming with poetic assurance, A Love Supreme is a remarkable novel
about the boundless potential of the creative spirit.