Skin of Sunset

By David Johansson

This novel is about your mouth. It looks at who you kiss with it, what you stick into it, what you drink with it and what you say with it. You're responsible when it makes a mess, after it has stuffed... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615189504
• ISBN13: 9780615189505
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: Squire Press
• Length: 363 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Skin of Sunset

Emotionally charged and technically superb, Skin of Sunset is about how we live and how we love, and our struggle to make meaningful connections between the two. Johansson is a chronicler of the landscape of memory and desire. I'll never forget his characters or his insights into their lives. This book is unforgettable. His three main characters still haunt me, though it has been months since I last read his novel.

Taste this! by Michelle Freeman, Seattle Wa

A wise, gut-wrenching story that sighs and breathes with outraged sorrow. The tone is pitch-perfect - regretful, bitter, edgy, brilliantly shaped by comic asides. As modern Americans attempt to cope with love and loyalty, Johansson shows us individual destiny within an indifferent culture, while also paying homage to the nature of memory and personal responsibility, and the way we are all enslaved by life's sexual and moral complexities. Definitely a worth while read for anyone who's mouth waters and tingles for a dark tangled morality,yet be surprised as light and air shine up through the sentences like tiny rays of hope.

Gripping and will keep readers reading from first page to last

The pursuit of happiness is vaguest of things guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. "Skin of Sunset" is a novel telling of three friends who begin to drift apart when tossed into the harsh reality of the real world after college. Although they establish a law firm together, it doesn't seem to prevent tensions from rising as the story boils down to a sordid affair of sex, betrayal, and a quick downward spiral toward violence. "Skin of Sunset" is gripping and will keep readers reading from first page to last.

A New Voice in Fiction

Johansson fractures plot and narration, creating a cinematic experience of psychedelic intensity with shifts in focus and chronology. The astonishing quality of the book is how stunningly Johansson depicts our world: its rapidly evolving technology and interior mind-set, the fragile psyche under a withering storm of stimuli. This is a war zone -- between hearts and minds. Yet amid the back stabbing, adultery and revenge within Johansson's sometimes sentimental love story, he reveals a kind of secret. Life un-treasured is life lost. And so "carpe diem" is given a new twist: The most innocent beginnings can deteriorate into mania and insanity when the bloom of youth begins to fade. Yet Johansson also offers a strong pulse of hope, as his hero, Barton Squire, refuses to quit on his obsessive love for his wife despite his mid-life crisis, testosterone surges and competition with his business partner, the repulsively charismatic Helmut Knight. This book is amazing, comic and bittersweet, so rife with longing it gets under your skin, like the narrator's knowledge that the wildly colorful sunset only masks the black space beyond.

Fantastic novel by a great professor

I am currently enrolled in one of Prof. Johansson's college classes. We were treated to a reading of a few chapters from his novel, "Skin Of Sunset", during one lecture. What I heard was everything the description says it is. It's dark, and funny, and harrowing, oftentimes in the same chapter, even the same page. I'll definitely be getting a copy as soon as it becomes available. And you should too!