About the Quartet
Both a private history and a universal tale, this genre-defying series traces the lives of four friends on a journey of tragedy and self-discovery.
Along the way, they navigate the treacherous intersections of love and comradeship; they experience the redemptive power of art; they learn how right is not always rational and how the probable is not always the real. They are the patron saints of the imperfect and the everyday, of foolish stabs at freedom, and of losing everything for love.
Book I, SAILING TO BYZANTIUM - now available at your local bookseller!
Book II, THE EVERYTHING - coming January 2022!
About the Author
L. F. Ranner
Over the last two decades, I have published scholarly articles related to my academic field, but I have not submitted a work of fiction or poetry for publication. During this time, to write became less necessary, but also harder, drier, less a relief than a discipline, and eventually what had been a torrent of words and ideas was reduced to an insignificant trickle that I tended to regard as a marker of the person I once was, but had now probably ceased to be.
This changed in November of 2018. For reasons unknown, a switch flipped in my brain. For seventeen years, I had been playing with the idea of a story about three musicians who find themselves one summer immersed in the alternate universe of a Greek cruise ship. Hundreds of story lines had passed through my mind during this period, but this was the one that stuck and these were the characters that refused to be forgotten, even though every time I tried to write their story into life, my effort and energy would be whittled away into frustration.
This time was different. It being Thanksgiving holidays, I thought, “What the hell, I’ll just start writing and see what happens,” and from that point onward, it was as if not only the switch had been flipped, but the projector started rolling, and the entirety of this story unfolded scene after scene in my mind, and on the page.
I wrote the book straight through, and when I finished in the first week of May of 2019, I felt happy and satisfied with what I had done for about five days. However, I began to realize that I had closed a door on a room where I still had a substantial amount of unfinished business and that this novel was not a discrete entity, but rather part of a nexus of stories interconnected by the lives of individuals around which, rather than about which, they are told. I immediately began work on the second novel, which I finished in January of 2020; and the third, completed in Jaunary of this year. I am not quite halfway through the fourth and projected final novel in the Quartet.