Love Before Covid

"Love before Covid - A raw, philosophical dive into love's messy reality-unflinching, dark, and unapologetically human. Unlike typical romance novels, LOVE BEFORE COVID is a dialogue-driven exploration of human flaws and ideologies, blending fiction with metaphysical inquiry. It's not about comfort; it's about confrontation and insight."


Laced with dark humour, it is best described as traumatic (sur)realism. Love Before Covid takes the reader on a journey through the mind of Joe Pastorius - jazz fan, poet, and victim of horrendous sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother.


The real-time dialogues between the characters that emerge from Joe's unconscious come via arguably corrupted memories and dystopian dreams. They tell us more about Joe than he could ever know, and perhaps more about our world than you could ever imagine.


Dialogues entail an exploration of clashing perspectives and opinions, that cause reflection. Today though, our world has been infiltrated by online dialogues that tend to feel like wild unfiltered streams of human thought, raw, chaotic and often polarising and devoid of much reflection. Arguably that attitude, and lack of reflection is mirrored by the characters you will encounter. The reflection comes from the reader as the situations unfold. Your moral boundaries will without doubt be pushed to the limit.


You will meet an altruist who can't stand up for himself, a charming but violent public intellectual, a beautiful dancer who hates fat people, a flirty and gregarious bartender who will do anything to get pregnant, a traumatised art historian who never wants to be a mother, a successful intellectual Mexican writer who is secretly disapproving of her childhood friend's career as a pornstar, the teenage genius son of that pornstar who has sexual fantasises about his mother, a woman who is pressured into cutting off her penis and a successful therapist who has a habit of ruining people's lives.


And yes, before you ask, some of the characters in this book eventually catch Covid 19. However, there is always hope. For Joe Pastorious, that comes in the form of the psychopath named Janet Waverley.


" Divided into five parts, and mainly consisting of dialogues between character pairs, the book is a hefty tome which reads surprisingly quickly. The dialogues, somewhat script-like, make it completely accessible to anyone. It's a work of fiction but some aspects of the dialogues scream with bitter realism ...This is a book which intrigues, revolts, repulses, stimulates, in parts a stream of consciousness, in others, a metaphysical treatise on contemporary discourse in our media, universities and homes. To read this book is to experience being a silent ghost, haunting bedrooms, living rooms and coffee shops, watching and listening to the most intimate details of conversations spoken by others ...This is a challenging book, one not easy to forget. Dazzling in its originality and depth, it's like nothing you have ever read before or will read again. Unless it is written by Greg Scorzo."


- KAREN HARRADINE - Author/ Political commentator