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Ebook235 pages3 hours
Letters to the End of Love
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this ebook
With the readability of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the literary grace of Colm Tóibin, this brilliant debut novel satisfies on all levels. Three stories, three secrets, three marriages. In a coastal village in Cork in 1969, a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife write letters to one another as they try to come to terms with a fatal illness. On Australia’s west coast in 2011, a bookseller writes to her estranged partner in an attempt to understand what has happened to their relationship. In Bournemouth in 1948, a retired English doctor writes letters to the love of his life, a German artist he lived with in Vienna during the 1930s. The simple domestic lives of these three couples are set against conversations about intimacy, art, war and loss. Told in a series of unforgettable letters, this is a novel about love and what it means when it might be coming to an end.
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Reviews for Letters to the End of Love
Rating: 3.9642857142857144 out of 5 stars
4/5
28 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The perfect antidote to the sadly awful The Light Between Oceans, I am stunned that this superb book has not been widely lauded, and cannot thank enough the friend who sent this my way as a birthday present. Three narratives sit lightly side by side, not so much connected as shades of each other. They are presented in the form of a series of letters between lovers: a pair of current day Perth women whose relationship has recently been fraying around the edges attempt to find their way back to each other through letters; in 1960s Cork an Irish writer and her Russian painter husband who has recently received diagnosis of a fatal condition leave each other love letters each day, exploring their shared past and cherishing their last days together; and a retired English doctor in 1948 Bournemouth writes tenderly to and of his lost lover, a young German man who, it soon becomes apparent, did not survive World War Two. I honestly can't praise this too highly, and feel almost wordless in the face of such beauty. The quality of the writing is fabulously good: insightful, gorgeous, eloquent and enormously touching without being syrupy. If it were in my power to give this book ALL THE LITERARY PRIZES I would do so without a qualm. I have underlined nuggets of particular brilliance, but really the whole thing is an absolute, scintillating gem. Here are some to be going along with, but I urge you all more strongly than I can express to buy, beg, borrow, steal this; read it by any means necessary.As you say, my heart is collapsing in a strange, slow way, like old beliefs worn away. (The Cork Letters)I have the ghost of you pressing against my ribs like deep water. (The Bournemouth Letters)I remember watching you sleep, watching you dream, wondering what you were dreaming about. It's been one of the reasons I've stayed through the unhappiness, one of the many reasons I stayed, as there was so much love there, in the middle of the night, when nothing else had to be done, or said. It was the perfect time to uncover how much you loved a person, you could feel it, just there, hitting at the wall of your heart like a small butterfly, so delicate you missed it in every other hour. (The Perth Letters)I sit here now, having reviewed my under-linings, filled with loveliness and some small tears. Good, good, good.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A lovely meditation on love, in the form of letters between three couples from different eras and places. The structure took me a little while to settle into - a few tenuous links between the stories had me looking for deeper connections which weren't there - but I eventually realised that the three stories were only thematically linked. In each, people are facing the end of love - through illness, death or estrangement, and the letters they write to each other dig into their rich, messy, passionate experiences with each other and with life, as well as into the tiny, ordinary details that make up a relationship. It's impressively done.