The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran

17 March 2025

The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran

Sara Gran is an American author who’s written a handful of novels I’d never heard of before this one. The Book of the Most Precious Substance was recommended to me by my mentor at Regis University’s Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing—and I can speculate why.

The novel follows Lily, a forty-something published author-turned-bookseller, as she jetsets across the Atlantic to track down The Book of the Most Precious Substance for a million-dollar payout. But there’s another reason she wants the book: it contains an erotic spell (centered upon sexual substances) which, if completed correctly, can give you whatever you want most in this world. And Lily wants to heal her husband’s early onset dementia, a task even the best physicians have determined impossible. Obviously, during her hunt for the book, as happens whenever anything worth that much money or power is involved, calamity ensues.

Gran’s characters throughout this novel are colorful and witty. Each stands out in my mind so vividly that I can see them, hear them, and in some cases, smell them. Although most of them were only surface level elaborate, not notably complex or layered, they were immensely entertaining. Lily’s character was likewise colorful, but she was complex and layered: we learn early about her husband’s illness, we learn about her parentage, we learn why she acts the way she does, what she wants, and what she needs.

What I enjoyed probably most about this novel is Gran’s bold and unflinching approach to the erotic. As one might guess from the sexual nature of The Book of the Most Precious Substance, there is a lot of sex in this book. The sexual encounters come in a variety of flavors: heterosexual, homosexual, orgies, BDSM, etc. Yet Gran never demurs from them. For some reason, it has always bothered me when the new and/or emerging writers I know personally play it safe. What are you hiding from? Do you think the world believes you’re celibate? Do you think the world would want to read your work if you were celibate? On the other hand, I worry about my interest in writing the erotic. Am I just your standard romance writer, after all? While there were moments as I read Gran’s novel that I wondered to myself, “Is this smut?” there were also moments that I was in awe of her bravery – and skill – in writing the erotic. Probably this is why my mentor recommended the book to me: it is literary yet erotic.

SPOILERS BELOW

My intent from here is not specifically to spoil the book’s ending, but rather to talk about craft. It just so happens that the ending contains at least two craft concerns worthy of address.

What made me want to launch this book across the room as I approached the end of the story was the unforeseen, un-foreshadowed turnaround in Lucas’s character and behavior. Of course, mystery novels need plot twists; nobody wants to read a book that they can predict from the outset. Still, Lucas’s shift in the final moment of his life, when we learn that he’s been murdering people all along, is blindsiding. It’s perhaps even more blindsiding when Lily turns around and stabs him—without any hesitation or remorse—as though she knew it was him all along (How?). In Stephen King’s Misery, Paul Sheldon talks about how solutions to the conundrums in a storyline must be right. Sure, you can whip up a solution or ending that works, but is it right? Does it fit the situation perfectly, real or fantasy? Gran’s ending here, with this 180 in Lucas’s and Lily’s characters works, but it doesn’t feel right. It feels…cheap…fast…a little greasy, like Gran needed to finish the book for a deadline and rushed through the final chapters. There is a lesson to be had from this: the solutions to the conundrums in my stories will be right, and if there is going to be a major plot twist such as Gran’s, I will drop the proverbial breadcrumbs along the way. This is particularly relevant to my current novel in its current state of drafting.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this book until the final few chapters. Perhaps the ending, which was such a letdown, is what we deserved after rooting for people who would commit murder in order to attain ultimate power.