"A Coal to His Lips" is Anthony Starke's intense and gripping first novel. It combines a poetic yet restrained use of language, a concise, driven narrative, vibrant character development, and the sort of solid, lucid, philosophical underpinnings found in the works of Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, and Paul Bowles.

"A Coal to His Lips "is the story of Henry Norman, a young, imprisoned African-American man who undergoes a spiritual/psychological transformation in the novel. He finds that he has an unmanageably powerful (and sometimes unwanted) effect on those around him.

Henry's struggle, and ultimate triumph, is to learn to integrate a greater understanding of his true nature while learning to accept and honor the boundaries of his life as an ex-con and, by the end of the book, his roles as son, friend, lover, husband and father.

"A Coal to His Lips" is at its core a mystical, moving, sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying, always engaging examination of the problem of identity.