Love in the Shadow of Death explores the professional and intertwined lives of doctors as they and their family members come down with the COVID. It also delves into the suffering of their patients as they recover or die alone in the hospital. A new, fictional variant, named Pi, that solely affects the brain and causes Amnestic Brain Fog, brings about considerable turmoil and debate as to whether the virus was created in a lab to be selectively released in New York. One doctor embarks on unearthing the mystery.  

This powerful novel, set in the pandemic years, brings us close to the mystery of love in a time of destruction and death. It tells the story of lovers caught in the grips of mortality; their luminous, ebullient lives misted over in a world subject to rapid change. Beautiful and profoundly moving, it is emotionally accurate, and wise. Gomes’ creation of the Pi variant causing Amnestic Brain Fog, is imaginatively immense.
—Grace Schulman, author of seven exclaimed books of poetry including, New and Selected Poems, and winner of the Frost Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry. She is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, Baruch College, C.U.N.Y.

Everyone in the world of this novel is threatened by the presence of Covid, each one’s fate an uncertainty. It is all seen through the eyes of a physician, Jeff Anderson, an infectious disease specialist with a central role in fighting the challenges of the pandemic, accentuated by the personal dilemma of finding the people he loves most transformed into patients he is committed to cure. Again and again, love and friendship face an urgency. For Jeff, what would have been a medical challenge if his cases had been strangers becomes an emotional crisis when those in danger are the people who make his life worth living. In this novel, Gomes through his characters and his creation of a new Pi variant speaks directly to his readers, aware each of us must cope with the vulnerabilities of a new, and constantly mutating, unfamiliar virus.
—Walter Cummins, author of more than 10 books including Knowing Writers. He is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Love in the Shadow of Death, by António Gomes is a powerful and haunting story of love and loss set in the background of the most devastating pandemic of our lifetime. This remarkable novel accurately reflects the oppressive darkness of the disease and the extraordinary toll that it took on patients and health professionals in our hospitals and ICUs. At the same time, one experiences humanity’s resilience and adaptability in the face of unprecedented adversity. Gomes creatively and masterfully uses the rapid mutation of the Corona virus to fictionally create the Pi variant that selectively affects the brain causing Amnestic Brain Fog in his friend Jacques, the playboy intervention cardiologist and several other patients. “The scene looked like a human bog with some patients floating around as they circled their beds aimlessly in an awkward maze-like formation staring into nothingness, zombie-like, while others lay on their beds, heads bobbing, all attired in the same blue scrubs.” Gomes is a masterful storyteller in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
—Umesh K. Gidwani, MD, MS, FCCM, FACC, FCCP, FSCAI, Professor of Medicine Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Chief, Cardiac Critical Care, Zena and Michael A. Wiener Cardiovascular Institute; Director, Cardiac ICU, Mount Sinai Hospital and System Director, ICCM Patient Safety and Quality.

Love in the Shadow of Death, by António Gomes takes us into COVID-19’s outbreak through the eyes of Jeff, an infectious disease physician. “My usual inwardness was now thrust outward, as if the essence of my soul had uncoiled in preparation of my life’s work.” Manhattan is at the beginning of a pandemic that now seems ancient as the plagues of Rome. A sense of the dystopic pervades the text as we enter the ICUs of breathing machines and deathbed separations of families, a world where Code Blues are no longer called as the death toll mounts. Gomes, a cardiologist as well as an author, writes masterfully of human physicality and psychology under pressure. “I held a leucospermum flower in my hand, marveling at its globe like shape with radiant red spikes.” We meet Fleur, Jeff’s wife, beautiful, rich, and haunted by the sexual molestation and kidnapping that lie in her past, and his lover, Antonina, an Italian physician. A new variant causing Amnestic Brain Fog invades the high stakes world of Jeff’s mentor Jacques, the playboy heart specialist, that strips him of memory and self. The variant begins to spread, and suspicions surround the Center designed to study it. A thriller, a passion play, a poetry of disease, Gomes’ prose is supple enough to illuminate the scientific as well as the metaphorical. His imagery is often stunning. “As their vines opened my mouth wide the alliums with their long stems entered my throat and went down my windpipe.” Gomes has written an impassioned and essential novel about a turning point in our history. “A frothy crimson blood with floating corona flowers.”
—Stephanie Dickinson, author of more than 9 books and Harlow/Smith Postcards: Icons in Black & White. She is the founding editor of Rain-Mountain Press.

Novels are intriguing and valuable tools in the hands of the imaginative writer. In Love in the Shadow of Death, António Gomes does not spare his imagination to penetrate the distant interiors and the complexities of the evolving Coronavirus that devastated NY and the world at large. In the novel Love and relationships constantly compete with Death. “And man was being finally defeated by an unseen microorganism….” Gomes brilliantly uses his medical mind and fascinating imagination to scrutinize the multi-sector intersection of human ecology. As much as the Pi Variant and Amnestic Brain Fog are fictional developments in the imagination of the author, they represent evolving, elusive and challenging new domains of viruses in anticipation what may be inevitable in the future. In this novel, Gomes shows us his expansive knowledge of medicine and boundless understanding of the socio-anthropological, economic and political complexity of our society when faced with a catastrophic pandemic. 
—Basilio G. Monteiro, PhD. Professor, St. John’s University, NY, USA, author of Humanizing Artificial Intelligence: The agonizing relationship between anthropomorphism of the machine and the mechanomorphism of the human. 

Love in the Shadow of Death, by António Gomes, is a breathtaking story of man’s moral timber in the face of unprecedented calamity brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic. We encounter the main protagonist Jeff, a dedicated infectious diseases specialist, a sleuth with a compassionate heart, who not only struggles carrying for his dying patients, but also wrestles with his wife’s emotional state, and her COVID illness. He grapples with the scientific workings of his superior and fellow doctors, his best friend’s infidelities, and the speculative treatment of the new variant causing Amnestic Brain Fog; notwithstanding, his determination to unravel the mystery surrounding the Pi variant. In all of this, he suffers the denunciations of his superior as he ferociously attempts to demystify his own beliefs. Although the fictional Pi variant rendered the patients into a human bog, Gomes fictional creativity enables the Pi variant to invade the emotional brain centers ameliorating his wife’s dysfunctional personality and killing his friend’s sexual appetite. As we approach the final chapter we wonder whether Jeff’s determination to save lives and unearth the mystery of the Pi variant, will kill him too! As a thriller, Gomes gets the reader involved in his characters private and professional lives as they battle to alleviate the suffering of the struggling humanity.
—Linda Thorson, Honors Graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, UK; starred as Tara King in the British TV series The Avengers; The Other Sister with Diane Keaton, Sweet Liberty with Michael Caine & Michelle Pfeiffer; Valentino with Rudolph Nureyev; on Broadway, Noises Off, City of Angels. Recipient of the Drama Desk Award, BAFTA Award UK, Theatre World Award, and The Le Prix Triumph.

António Gomes, aka J. Anthony Gomes is a prominent physician, and a professor of cardiology at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, NYC. He has been listed in The Best Doctors in New York, Top Doctors, and Best Doctors in America for several years. He has published articles in the humanities in anthologies, books, newspapers, and magazines. In addition, he has published two books of poetry entitled Visions from Grimes Hill (Turn of River Press, Stanford, Connecticut, USA, 1994) and Mirrored Reflections (GOA 1556 and Fundacão Oriente, 2013); and three novels, The Sting of Peppercorns (GOA, 1556 & Broadway Books, 2010); 2nd edition, Amaryllis, New Delhi, India, 2017), Nas Garras Do Destino, (Chiado Editora, Brake Media, Lisbon, Portugal and Brazil, 2019), and Have A Heart (Serving House Books, Copenhagen, Denmark and South Orange, NJ, 2020) His publications in medicine include more than 180 scientific articles and three textbooks in cardiology: Signal Averaged Electrocardiography: Basic Concepts Methods and Application (Kluwer Academic Press, London/Amsterdam, 1993), Heart Rhythm Disorders: History, Mechanisms and Treatment Perspectives (Springer-Nature, 2020) and Rhythms of Broken Hearts (Springer-Nature, 2021).