Shepherd by Richard Matturro Publication April 2025

Richard Matturro’s Shepherd is about the discovery of second love by a man and a woman who have both lost the thread of their own lives. Stuart, following the death of his wife, has taken early retirement from his classics professorship and withdrawn from the world. Daphne, a newcomer to Stuart’s small village community, wears a more deliberate disguise, for still more bitter reasons. His searching out her secret adds an element of mystery to this subtly captivating narrative. Based (very loosely) on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid, Shepherd is a compelling story of love lost and regained — and also a healing meditation on grief and its survival, with something about what a good shepherd (in this case a dog) can do to mediate that process.

Author of six previous novels, Richard Matturro has Iris Murdoch’s unusual gift for making intellectual pursuits seem sexy. Shepherd also has something in common with David Malouf’s Ransom, A.S. Byatt's Possession, and John Barth's Tidewater Tales. Infused with flavors from Greco-Roman classical literature, this book, among its other qualities, takes a pure delight in language that adds to the deliciousness of the read.

Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising,
A finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award.
  

-Paul Mahaffey

Synopsis:

After his wife dies, Stuart Brown, a middle-aged classics professor, takes an early retirement from the university and largely withdraws from life too, until a funky little coffee shop opens in his rural small town. There he meets a nerdy woman of indeterminate age who arrives by bicycle each day. Most dismiss Daphne as simple minded or perhaps autistic, but Stuart is intrigued by a literary clue buried in the name of her German shepherd. Digging on the internet, he begins to identify her with a newspaper columnist from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who disappeared seven years before. Obsessed by the possibility that the two women are the same person, he is drawn to the writer as he reads her old columns online, while at the same time forming a relationship with Daphne, not knowing for certain if she is the columnist he has begun to fall in love with.

About the Author: Richard Matturro, a native of Rye, New York, holds a doctorate in English with a specialization in Shakespeare and Greek Mythology. After sixteen years at the Albany Times Union and fourteen years teaching literature at UAlbany, he now lives on an old farm in the foothills of the Berkshires. He is the author of numerous newspaper articles and short stories. Shepherd is his seventh novel.