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Love and loss
This month we bring you a moving and inspiring selection of fiction about love, loneliness and survival: books that could change your life. When a loved one is being mourned we often turn to poetry in order to express our deepest thoughs and feelings and so we also include two poetry collections. Click on the orange link to read more about the books including reviews and extracts.
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The History of Love by Nicole Kraus
Leo Gursky is just about surviving life in America, tapping his radiator to let his upstairs neighbour know he's still alive. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago in the Polish village where he was born Leo fell in love with a girl called Alma and wrote a book in her honour. These days he assumes that the book, and his dreams, are irretrievably lost, until one day they return to him in the form of a brown envelope. Meanwhile, a young girl, hoping to find a cure for her mother's loneliness, finds the book that changed her mother's life and she goes in search of the author. Soon these worlds collide in The History of Love, a captivating story of the power of love, of loneliness and of survival.
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood and on grief. Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, and in her diary she wrote, 'I used to think of him [father] and mother daily, but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind.' |
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Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore
Mourning Ruby is Helen Dunmore’s most ambitious novel to date, hugely moving and strongly plotted, about memory and history - both personal and public - about love, loss and mourning, and ultimately about the most important relationship in any novel - that of the reader to the writer. |
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Perfect Happiness by Penelope Lively
After a long and happy marriage, Frances is suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international celebrity husband Steven has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonizingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth-century - death and grief. |
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Carrying the Elephant by Michael Rosen
In 72 prose-poems of extraordinary power and vividness, Michael Rosen tells the central calamity of his life: the sudden death from meningitis of his eighteen-year-old son. 'Rather you than me' said one of the neighbours on hearing the news - a remark that Rosen records, as he does much else to do with the death, with a surprised, painful honesty which constantly brings the reader up short. Unflinching, totally lacking in mawkishness and self-pity, Carrying the Elephant is a triumph of imagination and curiosity. |
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Poems and Readings for Funerals by Julia Watson
It’s not always easy to find the poem that’s right for the occasion, especially at such a time of sorrow. As an actress, Julia Watson has sometimes been asked by friends for suggestions, and in this collection she offers over ninety poems and other short readings which could be read at a funeral or memorial service. |
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Author interviews
