Love and the Novel (eBook)

In this eloquent, captivating conversation between memoir and criticism, Christina Lupton also offers a mesmerizing love song to the experience of reading in its own right.

What happens when you fall in love and discover in yourself such urgency to be with your beloved that you overturn all the certainties and structures of your life? What next?This haunting and highly personal account is studded with memorable insights into dozens of the novels about love and loss that long shaped Lupton's professional and personal life, but its true contribution is to show us how and why even the most impassioned reader can't ultimately take novels as a blueprint for living.

I adored this book. An elegant, unflinching look at what it means to grapple with the true implications of our desire.

Lupton's unsparing memoir forces us to re-examine the lives lived on our bookshelves and in our heads.

An utterly addictive - sometimes caustic, sometimes tender - account of a midlife lurch in a new direction.

Tina Lupton's eloquent account of an unexpected real-life plot twist marries critical prowess and a gripping story, in an honest and fantastically insightful book.

Do novels help us know how to love? Is middle-aged passion worth upending your life and stability for? Instead of turning to shrinks to solve our romantic travails, clearly we should be turning to literature professors. Tina Lupton's eloquent account of an unexpected real-life plot twist marries critical prowess and a gripping story, in an honest and fantastically insightful book.

A subversive, brilliant and beautifully written book about love, play and power in fiction and in the well-read life

Interspersing self-examination with an equally gripping analysis of the texts that have made and remade their reader, Lupton's unsparing memoir forces us to re-examine the lives lived on our bookshelves and in our heads.

Such a rich exploration of love in all its forms (marital, adulterous; for children, friends). I love how Christina Lupton summons an iconic cast of our favourite fictional lovers ... even as her own desires carry her far beyond many of their teachings. A delicious combination of critical thought and passionate personal experience.

A memoir, as formidably intelligent as it is forcefully felt, about a life spent reading about love, which turned out to be the best preparation for letting "the pleasure of all scripts fall away" and discovering how to love differently