Five wayward love stories. What is it we seek in another's flesh--wholeness, transcendence, possession, escape? Can we trust the body's primal intelligence or is lust the fatal trap depicted in classic operas and Victorian novels? In "Rescue Mission" a divorced middle-aged man journeys to a desolate outpost in Africa to win back a childhood sweetheart more interested in apes than in men "Wars of the Flesh" follows the misadventures of a rebellious Swiss teenager who elopes with a penniless artist and follows him back to his devastated homeland in the wake of the Spanish Civil War. "Counter-Indications of Trance on the Male Libido" invites the reader to eavesdrop on a hypnotherapy session turned seduction. "The Guru's Mistress" lays bare the curious morality of a woman-child whose obsessive love for a guru endures celebrity, betrayal, and marriage to another man. In "The Open Green Mouth" a woman desperate to conceive a child accompanies her hunter husband to guerilla-occupied Putumayo, where the laws of the jungle conspire to fulfill her desire. We may love imperfectly, we may love blindly, but love we must.