Chartreuse

About the Book

Historically founded on a sixteenth century alchemist´s elixir of long life (and the basis for the French liqueur), CHARTREUSE is a story of supernatural transformation; of the elixir´s ingredients on which a Pope´s life rests; of a young man´s destiny and the chain of world events that lead to his final, wrenching choice.

The central character, Blaise, is summoned to Switzerland once he learns he has inherited a parchment containing the recipe for nothing less than the elixir of life. He´s directed to a distiller in the French countryside—a Carthusian monk at La Grande Chartreuse—for he alone knows how "to execute the formula to the greater glory of God and humanity."

At the same time, someone wants the Pope dead and has infected him with a fatal disease. So the race is on: to save the Pope; to see which woman will accompany Blaise during his travails—his current lover, or a flame from his past; to discover if the culprit can keep the elixir from reaching the Vatican.

CHARTREUSE is fast-paced without being frantic. And yet, in the drawing power of the plot´s twists and turns, so much more than a plot goes on: a romance, a thriller, a source book of homeopathy, miraculous events, a spiritual journey. It´s a search for a cure; a search for a moral code; a search for identity. With CHARTREUSE, Joseph Roccasalvo has written a novel about the sacred and the profane—a contemporary symbol of our 21st century lives.

About the Author

Joseph Roccasalvo followed his graduate degrees in Philosophy, English Literature, and Theology with a Harvard Ph.D. in Comparative Religion and a specialty in Buddhism. He has lived and taught in Boston, Bangkokm and Chicago. For ten years in New York City, he was a professor of religious studies at Fordham University's Bronx and Lincoln Center Campus. He was also visiting professor of Buddhism in Lugano, Switzerland. Now engaged in full-time teaching, he devotes himself to two alliterative loves: prose and pastoral work. A hospital chaplaincy and seven novels ensued: Fire in a Windless Place, Beyond the Pale, Chartreuse, Portrait of a Woman, The Devil's Interval, The Powers that Be, and the Odor of Sanctity. These were followed by two books of short stories, Outwards Signs and The Mansions of Limbo; a play, Waging Waugh, and a memoir, As It Were.