I am deeply respectful of the mind that has produced this book. LEONARD COHEN, Email to the author

Leonard Cohen has aimed high: to be all Jewish heroes at once. Like Jacob, he struggled with angels. Like David, he sang psalms and seduced women. Like Abraham, he moved from place to place and remained a stranger everywhere. But he never ceased doing what he did best: stepping into avalanches and reviving our hearts. From Montreal and New York to the Greek island of Hydra, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw the Angels Fall follows the singer’s cosmopolitan life and examines his perpetual dialogues with God, with himself, and with hotel rooms.

We see how six decades of writing songs and looking into the abyss transformed a young Jewish poet who longed to be a saint into an existentialist troubadour, then into a gravelly voiced crooner, determined to teach us a thousand ways of dissolving into love.

After twenty years of research, Christophe Lebold, who spent time with the poet in Los Angeles, delivers a stimulating analysis of Cohen’s life and art. Gracefully blending biography and essay, he interrogates the mission the singer had set out for himself: to show us that darkness is just the flip side of light.