Labyrinth of Desire:

Think of torch songs and the tango. Think of films such as Casablanca and The English Patient, of novels such as Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. Think of romantic, obsessive love, the hot bed of passion we fall into, the emotion we call true love. This is the subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s provocative and fascinating book Labyrinth of Desire.

Critical Praise for Labyrinth of Desire

“Eloquent…. Exhilarating….Women letting men turn them into wounds is an old, depressing story, but Sullivan chases it to a new and adventurous place.”
—O Magazine

“A beautifully woven tapestry of insightful corollaries and personal stories, offering fresh conjectures into the psyches of women and men in love.”
—Elle

“Original and engrossing. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Alice Munro

“I can’t say it surprised me that Rosemary Sullivan, a woman with a way-killer mind and industrial-strength balls, has written a fascinating page-turner on the old, irresistible question: Why do we love the way we do? There isn’t a sentence in the intellectually sexy Labyrinth of Desire where the reader doesn’t learn something very big about romantic, obsessive love.”
—Susan Musgrave, The Citizen’s Weekly

“Provocative and penetrating, Rosemary Sullivan’s look at obsessive passion is a pitch-perfect reading of the emotional arithmetic that accompanies romantic love. It is an elusive subject, but one Sullivan manages to pin down with deft dexterity.”
—The London Free Press

“She’s got style…. Like her country’s greatest literary critic, the late Northrop Frye, Sullivan is also a fine anatomist.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Labyrinth of Desire] is well written and contains fascinating information about some of the artistically strongest women in history…. Rosemary Sullivan asks interesting, eternal questions.”
—Washington Times

“This Canadian bestseller is an obsessive read not academic, but not self-help, either.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Sullivan’s introduction of real love stories and her conversational style, which creates intimacy between reader and writer, set this apart from other popular works on the subject.”
—Library Journal

“In this eye-opening book, Sullivan eradicates the bell jar effect of infatuation and conducts an honest tour of female entanglement with obsessive love…it is certainly a special book that…is bound to be shared and reread by women of all ages.”
—Booklist

“Sullivan’s tone is intimate, her touch light…. This is a clever, intriguing book.”
—The Globe and Mail

“Sullivan understands how seductive the call to romance is to women. She unmasks the myths with wonderful delicacy, yet never plays the hectoring schoolmarm, never wags her finger at the ditzy, martini-addled Carrie Bradshaw in all of us.”
—Lynn Coady, The Vancouver Sun

“Sullivan does a masterly job.”
—Maclean’s

“This thoughtful examination of romantic love is a series of timeless, cautionary clues for the young women who have not succumbed to it, a consoling touchstone for women who find themselves in the heart-scorching heat of it, and a knowing nod, a regard for those quiet women among us who carry in their hearts that thing we call, so mistakenly, a past.”
—Bonnie Burnard

“Labyrinth of Desire reads like a dream—it is slippery and easy pleasure…. Passion’s chemistry and effect is redrawn over and over again, until we come away from our encounter with Sullivan’s nimble and fearless mind, thoroughly entertained, but more importantly challenged and unafraid.”
—National Post

“Labyrinth of Desire is a cleverly crafted and beautifully written distillation of Sullivan’s reflections, life experience and ongoing discussions with friends, as well as her analyses of literary and historical relationships. I enjoyed it even more on second reading, having by then thought through the material, comparing it to my own related reservoirs of personal and literary knowledge. Like me, readers will identify themselves in its pages.”
—Elizabeth Abbott, The Gazette (Montreal)

“Reading it in one sitting as I did makes for an intellectually sexy afternoon. A provocative (in the best sense) pleasure (in the only sense worth knowing).”
—Andrew Pyper

“Romantic obsession is one of those wickedly tricky subjects that easily leads to a badly written swamp of pitiful sentiment … but not in the discerning hands of veteran biographer Rosemary Sullivan … who here takes an unwieldy, wild subject and not only describes wonderfully its excruciating emotions, but unravels them with marvelous dignity.”
—Quill & Quire