“Gary Marks’s Orbiting Chaos is a beautiful, timeless novel that resists melodrama, choosing instead far more difficult territory, where love and spiritual freedom find ways to both heal and destroy each other. 

(Gabriel and Laney’s) relationship begins in shared solitude, deepened by music, the enormous beauty of Maui, and the fragile hope that intimacy might offer a form of rescue.

Marks is careful not to romanticize this hope. The bond between them grows slowly, sensually, and joyously. But it is a love formed on the margins of ordinary life, where two people recognize in each other their need to escape from the world and from themselves. 

What lingers after the beautiful final pages and its surprise ending is the understanding that once love is internalized, new doorways can appear. And someone someday just may knock softly on one of those doors.”