as our new release of the week: The Confessions of Max Tivoli. by Andrew Sean Greer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This novel begins, “We are each the love of someone’s life.” It tells the offbeat story of a man, born in San Francisco in 1871, who physically ages in reverse. Max looks like an old man as a child and slips toward infancy in his senior years. Throughout his life, he is hopelessly in love with a neighborhood girl named Alice and he gets three shots at winning her. Each time their paths cross she cannot recognize this ever-younger person as the man she knew before. “The consistency and intensity of this passion … serve as the anchor for the story, keeping its sometimes baroque flourishes in check,” says Gary Krist in a review for the New York Times. Author John Updike, reviewing Max Tivoli for The New Yorker, calls Greer’s work “Resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing.”

In a San Francisco Chronicle feature, Edward Guthmann describes it as “a wondrous novel.” He continues, “The book also fascinates in its textured view of pre-quake San Francisco, a city of ‘gilt-edged gas lamps and velvet walls.” A city where Lotta Crabtree sang ‘leather-lunged’ parodies of Jenny Lind, where sailors were shanghaied from Barbary Coast dives and children thrilled to Woodward’s Gardens, a theme park of sorts (at Duboce and Mission) with dromedary rides, a racetrack, herds of emus and ostriches and a sad trained bear named Splitnose Jim.”