In the City of Love's Sleep

by Lavinia Greenlaw

Iris, a museum conservator in her late forties, is separating from her husband while bringing up two daughters in a house that's falling down. Raif is a stalled academic, as uncertain of the past as he is the future, whose girlfriend is about to move in. They meet by chance, nothing important is said, yet Iris turns away and starts to run. She is running from what this encounter has woken in her. In the City of Love's Sleep is a contemporary fable about what it means to fall in love in middle age. It charts the steps two people take towards one another and what it means to have taken those steps before.

Genres: Fiction, Romance

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

For the past few days, I've been mulling over the thoughts I had while reading this book, wondering if they are worth posting here for others to read.
The doubt arises because I'm suddenly aware of the exhibition-like nature of review posting, this arranging of words in the review box which we all do, and the consigning of them to the goodreads archive for others to view and examine over time.
Way back in the last century, before I ever dreamed of posting such book thoughts, I would have laughed at the very idea. Who are those people who clutter the web with their words would have been my reaction. But I became a book-thoughts poster nine years ago, and without a lot of soul-searching as it turned out, so now I have 565 review boxes full of book thoughts stored in the goodreads archives. Perhaps one day they will serve as data for someone's thesis about reading lives in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

So what were the book thoughts that provoked such after-the-fact soul searching about book reviewing? The truth is, Lavinia Greenlaw's book had me questioning my own judgement. I wondered how I had found this love story intense yet cold and austere at the same time. I could sense passion underneath but nevertheless experienced the writing as very precise and controlled. I was tempted to label the book an over-clinical love story, but doubted I could be right about my conclusion, given the fact that the author is a poet. For all these reasons, I hesitated about posting any opinion at all.

But it seems I can't leave it at that so let me fill you in a bit more. The two main characters are a museum conservator whose job involves analyzing the most obscure artefacts in the museum's archives, and an art historian whose area of interest is the seventeenth century kunstkabinett, the cabinets/rooms full of curious items which their owners had collected over many years.

Because of that set-up, and because of the very analytical way the author deals with the characters, I began to think of the book itself in terms of a kunstkabinet — viewing it like that helped me understand it better. I imagined the author selecting her two main characters from some catalogue in her mind based on their 'curiosity' value, and placing them in the glass cabinet of the book's environment as an experiment, curious to see if they would survive in the rarefied atmosphere she'd created for them. I imagined she'd have checked their individual compositions first and established that they wouldn't be harmful to one another.
Once she'd put them in place, she'd try different temperatures and humidity levels to see what was ideal. She'd research their history and decide if it gave them, in the united state she planned for them, a coherent appearance. And even though she would hope that her two figures would communicate their essence to the viewer unaided, I imagined her writing a set of tags which she would place inside the cabinet as complementary exhibits, tags that would contain sentences such as:

Women perceive him as deep and men as slow.

She seems particularly clear and still.

What does he see in her? What he needs to. He sleeps and wakes and what comes to mind is a woman turning away. He follows her.

She enjoys the absence of time and weather, and the hours spent alone with a single object.

We are bound together by dark patterns as well as light. We choose someone who makes us feel and so feeling arises and it can’t all be good.

The lancet is the tool with which we prise ourselves apart. It’s a way of doing what the eye would like to: piercing surfaces and isolating detail so as to hold it up to the light.

Nothing makes us feel more alive than being reminded of our death.

I'm still mulling over how I feel about this curious love story but nevertheless I've decided to post this review, plus those stark but beautiful quotes.
The reviewing habit is hard to break. There's probably a study in that too.

And here's a final quote, which deserves its own special glass cabinet. Imagine a mummified heart alongside the quote :
…………………………………………………………

We rely on the continuous onward momentum of the heart and want above all not to notice it. If we do, we believe it to be precarious. We don’t think of it as its true brute self but as a flutter, a patter. It can also pound and ache, jump, leap, cry out or bleed. It can be heavy, cold or sore, warm, full or broken. A heart can be left somewhere or given away. It can be gold, stone or ice; pure, empty or open. Perhaps because it is so invested, we can only think of it as a simple shape. We see hearts everywhere and seek them out. We share pictures of heart-shaped pebbles, petals, cupcakes and sunglasses. Clouds, forests, fireworks and lakes appear heart-shaped. We point at them and say Look, a heart!

……………………………………………………………

[Tommi · Rating 5 out of 5]

[4.5] What a beautiful novel, and such an overlooked one, prompting me to round this up to 5 stars to balance out the incredibly low (and few) ratings it has so far. It is one of those rare stories that have managed to move me close to tears. Greenlaw knows how to deliver heartwrenching sentences all of a sudden: tiny gestures, words, scenes of everyday life in a relationship. Her language reveals she’s a poet, with a new collection coming out in a few months, in fact. As one of the protagonists works at a museum, there are vignettes of eccentric museum objects, and this sort of a “cabinet of curiosities” motif made me think of Flights by Tokarczuk and why not Sight by Greengrass, both of which I rated 5 stars, so go figure. Highly recommended.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a rather abstract novel about relationships, mostly romantic, but also a bit parental. Here’s a taste of what I mean by abstract, from the many observations made by the omniscient third-person narrator: “The shape love takes depends on what we need it for. It might be to simplify a landscape or to furnish an emptiness, to give our lives more detail or less. For Iris it’s the drawing of a circle. For Raif it’s the forming of a surface. Whatever it is, we do it ourselves and each time believe it different and the gift of the one we now love.”

This is a very sad novel, but I mostly found it a joy to read. The small number of characters are all terrible at relationships, and only moderately good at fooling themselves and each other. Occasionally (in small ways) Greenlaw goes for too much and falls short, but this is a novel I expect to read again. In fact, there are pages that demand re-reading right away (and yet not overly "difficult"); truly the work of a poet. A 4.5.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me by surprise. I didn't think I'd like it ('well-off middle-class people drifting around' is my least favourite genre), but it's so beautifully written and observed that I was utterly absorbed. My copy of this is full of underlinings.

[✵ Kas · Rating 5 out of 5]

★★★★★

Yes

I saw this cover, and i said yes- and the book said yes back. This is not the yes of accepting something that has been offered, but a yes of recognition. One could call this love at first sight, to recognise something that we have never known before and yet feels so familiar, so right.

And that right there is the style of observational musing that make this book so beautifully written. I fell in love with this book for its cover. Then its premise. And then its writing. Greenlaw has put into words the nuances of the human experience and thoughts about relationships that I would not have been able to express myself. I’ve highlighted so many passages!

Simply put, it’s a boy meets girl book. But it is so much more than that. It’s a poetic reflection on love, grief, beginnings, endings, curiosity and fear. It follows the lives of two middle aged city-dwellers slowly coming closer together over time, and explores the significance of having been with people on that path before. At times cathartic and relatable, at times jarring and hard to read. It feels highly controlled and curated, and yet abstract and flowing.

If you’re like me and you love poetic, observational books, written by clearly very intelligent people who have a passion for literature and arts and meaning, then i highly recommend this book!

'In hindsight, we call this love at first sight- when yes it met with yes and circumstances or propensities allow it to amplify unending.'

'Repetition teaches us how to recognise our true nature as we’re returned again and again to the aspects of ourselves.'

[Astrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plot summary: Iris and Raif have a crush on each other. The shock of infatuation leads them to reconsider their life choices. They make tentative moves on each other whilst dealing with their respective problems. Love both exposes them to and liberates them from the pains of past traumas that haunt and mould their present lives.

[1] The first chapter of this book can only be described as SPECTACULAR. Concise, and rhythmic in the way that good poetry is, this first chapter bears witness to one of the BEST portrayals of the VIOLENCE of love at first sight I've EVER read. Read this chapter and you'll fall in love with this book at first sight.


"And as she walked away she saw it all – that her body was ticking and had she asked and had he followed she would have done anything, so sharply did the space between them fall away. And so she ran."

[2] Sometimes, good writing is a fault. For this book, the brilliance of the first chapter is a fault.

Nothing that follows will match the zenith of the first chapter. The language of the rest of the book, which is actually very stylish and imaginative, seems dead in comparison.

On a meta level this is interesting though. History casts a shadow over the characters' lives as my history of having read the first chapter overshadows the rest of my reading experience, and as the book itself warns, love at first sight often ends in disappointment and pain, which is what has now happened to my relationship with this book. I feel like I'm experiencing the main themes of the book twice: both in the book and in real life.

[3] My overall impression of the book is mannered. I keep getting the sense that Greenlaw is trying too hard to shape the mundane into something profound, at the cost of sounding forced if not trite.

"In the city it's not difficult to see the adjustments people have made. Some have locked up parts of themselves as if in a separate room. Others multiply and set off in several directions at once."
"A million fragments of ordinary life – clay pipes, bear bottles, buttons and soup bowls – are cast up. They've been in the river for a hundred years, some thousands, but unless you take them now, they will return to the flow and be carried out to the river mouth and you will never see them again."
The links Greenlaw tries to establish between the city and love seem quite tenuous and not that interesting.
"They stick to meeting in the centre of the city, where so much is designed to carry love along."
"The point is not to map the city but to find our way towards each other within it while the river runs on."

[4] Some remarks are nice and insightful though:

"Their affinity has yet to be tested or applied and so is easy to believe in."
"We navigate the city by churches and fish markets just as we give emotions names that belong to a simpler time, if there ever was one."
"The man on Iris's right had been very attentive but she knew that she was getting the best of him. We start with our best selves. Had the woman he was with been stung like that, David would have leapt about finding ice and she would have been like Iris – smiling and grateful and dismissive of her pain."
"The tissue of feeling can be prised apart into layers that are easy to define but not to reconcile. So we travel its surface, striving to feel whatever can be called right or good or reasonable."
"We look to love as a way of transforming ourselves and so blame our lover if we don't like who we become."

[5] Greenlaw is good at imagery. This is why I finished the book despite finding it disappointing and at times cringey (see [4]).

"In the sea of the room, she appeared as dry land."
"Did the wife carry home this encounter like a jewel slipped into her pocket, something she found in her hand now and then, turned over and let drop?"
"She adds her best wishes. A month passes and Iris starts to feel as if she's waiting for an echo."
"... when his hand reached out and touched her cheek as if testing the surface of something extremely frail."
"She is so aware of the warmth and scent of his skin that she might as well be touching him, they might as well be pressed together, inside one another, right here."
"There is the ice over the deep lake of loving and losing his wife, and there is the bed of that lake which is the death of his father."

[6] Greenlaw makes a point of highlighting how the fact of being middle-aged gets in the way of dating. This is interesting.

"The people around them look young and at home. ... The atmosphere makes Iris feels old and Raif somehow ashamed."
"But this is not some candlelit bedsit or corporate flat. They are two middle-aged people trying to persuade themselves into sex on a Sunday afternoon."
"She wants this to be fear but knows it might be age."

[7] If you're into psychoanalysis you'll find this book relevant. There's a whole chapter on compulsion to repeat, plus implicit references to the insistence of the signifying chain. There's also a mention of woman as masquerade:
"Perhaps women are no more than a series of veils?"

And Raif's biggest problem is classically Lacanian –
"What kind of life do you want?"
"Could you answer that question?"

Nothing particularly new or interesting has been said on these subjects though. They're brushed upon and that is all.

[8] (spoiler alert!) The scene where Iris helps David shower after his stroke which left him unable to recognise her. This scene is incredibly moving.

"The way David takes her head and presses it to his is so familiar that she wants to stay there forever, being held by him until they're both washed away."

[9] Here are some nicely existential themes for fans of existentialism. Bad faith is portrayed as an important aspect of relationships. Most characters seem to struggle with their facticity and transcendence as being-for-itself –

"You were young, said her friends, the night before the wedding."
"But that suggests I was some other self who can be discounted now I've come to my senses. Only I am that person. I will always be that person."

Verdict: Wonderful first chapter, but the rest of the book is kind of meh, though not without some gems here and there. Maaybe recommend.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the beginning of a book, of a new book and a new author, you are always at a disadvantage. You don’t know the scene, the situation or the players within. Gradually a story unfolds and characters develop. Sometimes quickly, sometimes, like here, on a slow burn that grows into a fire.

I am going to try to read more novels by poets. Every time I find a new novelist-poet I am entranced by the language and the scene building. I find incredible sparse lines or paragraphs that say in a line what it takes others pages and pages to convey. For example this one line perfectly encapsulates the deterioration in the relationship between Iris and David:

When they decided they could afford to re-cover the sofa, they chose a fabric that neither of them liked.

Both parties have given up, to a state that they are no longer invested, but at the same time they are pretending to be present in their family life.

It was the cover that drew me to this book. It caught my eye, stopped me in my tracks and made me pick it up and read the inside of the fly leaf. Although we say don’t judge a book by the cover, if can often be a cover that grabs your attention in the first place. A poor cover might never have done that for you.
This cover is a photo of a distant statue – little more than a centimetre high on the whole front – balanced precariously on a multi-layered tower. A figure about to shoot an arrow and balanced on the ball of one foot. The left leg is trailing out in mid-air. Could it be a woman? Even that is not certain from a distance. The cover gives no assistance – saying only ‘copyright unknown’. Not even what or where. Another mystery. It is simply what it is. A beautiful photo. The statue is unique because of the trailing strands of fabric that lend the figure the impression of swift movement.

After I had finished the book I came across an LRB article by the author all about the statue. Diana, the huntress. Sitting on the top of Madison Square Gardens, the largest amphitheatre in America at the time. She was thirteen feet high and a weathervane made of beaten copper. Installed in 1893, she was only there to make the building the tallest in the city. Not a record that lasted long. Madison Square Garden went bankrupt in 1925 and the New York Insurance Company had the building demolished to make way for something taller. After languishing in a warehouse for years, the statue of Diana finally passed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who in 2013 had her regilded using 180 square feet of gold leaf. I am glad I didn’t learn all this before reading the book, as it might have distracted me by looking for parallels between Diana and the characters.

In the City of Love’s Sleep is a stunning novel. Much underrated. It captures a slow building love affair between two people that don’t at first recognise what is happening.
The main protagonist is called Iris. She works in a museum restoring artefacts. The man that she meets is called Raif. This passage comes from their first encounter at a formal function:

Neither could later remember how their conversation began. It was a turning towards one another as natural as walking. Within minutes they were talking about their fathers, both architects, neither successful and both now dead. She asked him if he’d wanted to become one too, was it expected of him as it had been of her, and he laughed and said no, his family never thought him clever enough and anyway what interested him was cupboards and what people chose to put inside them. She came away with an impression of gentleness and complication that she later construed as warmth and depth. And while she could not describe his face, she would remember the pleasure of being unable to place him. Who was he?

Iris is still married to David, while Raif lost his American/Estonia wife two years earlier and is on the verge of another relationship. The slow burn of the relationship between Raif and Iris is because we first move through their imploding connections. Iris and David are described thus:

They’re two blunted and acid individuals who’ve discovered that it’s easy to say the worst thing. They aren’t adults in pain, they’re monsters.

Greenlaw is a London writer. She has lived in and around London for most of her life and so the city features heavily in her writing. Often, as here, poetically:

Much of the city could be described as historical. There are buildings, monuments and other landmarks that have been here so long that no-one questions their permanence. We make what use of them we can. We have repurposed our libraries, fire stations, churches, warehouses, butchers and pubs. We no longer require guildhalls, telephone boxes, docks or ballrooms and turn them into other things while still calling them what they were. We navigate the city by churches and fish markets just as we give emotions names that belong to a simpler time, if there ever was one.

And then a second reference to the city sent me off to write a short story of my own. It stirred a memory of my own, bringing back events from more than twenty years ago:

The city is full of trees, reinforcing the idea that it is not a city at all but a series of villages. Who can feel that they belong in a place that is almost a thousand square miles? It breaks down out of necessity. You are not in the city but in a district or street. You can’t see everything at once or keep all you know in mind, just as you can’t arrange to meet someone in the city. You have to contrive a smaller place…
It was a brief time of golden evenings and when Iris finished work she did not hurry back to her studio flat. She took to sitting in a disused Quaker cemetery filled by an ancient capsized fig. The cemetery’s low brick walls leant against the offices that had grown up around it. It was one of those small green spaces to be found all over the city, where people think themselves unobserved, especially on golden evenings. You will see them, lovers in office clothes who have waited all day to hold hands and who must soon go home, only for now there is a small space in which what they do doesn’t count and isn’t wrong. It’s such a small space. Why do you think they look so sad?

Because Iris works as a conservator, there are frequent digressions into some of the objects that she is working on, or that she and Raif discuss. Some of these are fascinating. I particularly liked the page about the mortsafe. An iron cage from the nineteenth century when there was a high demand from anatomists for fresh corpses. The mortsafe was an iron cage wrapped around the coffin to prevent theft. After six weeks or so it was dug up and reused, as they body was then beyond the point of being useful. It had two locks and separate people would hold the keys. Greenlaw completes the page with this observation:

The structures we borrow in order to protect ourselves cannot keep us intact. Our need for them reveals how vulnerable – or should that be susceptible – we are to being carried off, opened up, exposed.

As the book draws to a close, Greenlaw reflects on the relationship between Iris and Raif. And also more generally on the nature of love itself.

Do they understand that their capacity to go forward together comes from the very thing that’s held them back? Repetition teaches us how to recognise our true nature as we’re returned again and again to the aspects of ourselves that we cannot reshape. We learn how to say ‘I cannot do or be or live like this’ and if we’re lucky we also learn how to say ‘That is what makes me happy. I will pursue and cherish that.’
The past is always breaking down and rebuilding. And repetition, like memory, is never perfect: the original is always altered a little in the act. And the idea that two people can take up a line and feel its pull wherever they are is too simple. Life in the city is one of constant revision, diversion and impediment. Nothing proceeds straightforwardly. Lovers can only hope to find themselves in the same place and, if they are lucky, looking in the same direction.

Powerful and profound, like so much of this book. If I had to find a fault, it would only be the decision to not show speech marks. Is someone talking or is this line just an observation? Other than that, I loved it.

[Frenje · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow, contemplative... this felt like an art film version of Alain de Botton’s On Love, where every moment and flicker of emotion is dissected and wrapped in poignancy... in slow motion. There was a certain poetry and inventiveness to the book, but ultimately, I felt lulled gently (and frustratingly) into a sense of pessimism about love, and really wanted to just run away from these depressing characters and their depressing lives.

[Laura Spira · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect to be quite so impressed by this book. Usually books featuring solipsistic introspective individuals leave me cold but this is so beautifully written that I was drawn into it and found the ways in which the relationships between and around the two protagonists are structured and described quite intriguing.

Although I wouldn't want to spend any time with Iris or Raif, they are very realistic characters and while they struggle to understand themselves in a way that can be tedious in places, the author's voice provides some compelling insights into love and relationships, expressed so vividly that I reread many passages. The book reminded me a little of another novel by a poet, Elizabeth Smart's "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept", although this story is more emotionally circumscribed and less passionate.

[Pons · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the writing is something to be savoured, it didn’t make up for the formulaic and contrived storyline.

[Genna · Rating 3 out of 5]

First time reading Lavinia, but for some reason her style and the tone of this book is reminiscent of Graeme Green. Like a modern day End of the Affair. Listened to the audiobook, brilliant and moving narration by Rebecca Calder

[Anne Goodwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iris crosses paths with Raif at an event in the museum where she works. Although they barely speak, both feel an intense connection, a momentary ‘yes’. Over the next year or so, chance and their overlapping professional spheres bring them closer together. But slowly, tentatively, because neither feels sufficiently free or confident enough to take a chance on love.
Full review
Where is love? Nothing but Dust & In the City of Love’s Sleep https://annegoodwin.weebly.com/1/post...

[Matilda Burn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly this was really depressing, and not in a fun way. Was incredibly cold and bitter and the "hopeful" ending just made it worse. It was beautifully written, just not an enjoyable read really. I always feel bad when I don't enjoy sad books, because I guess we should accept sad "realism" as a natural counterpart to happiness, but all this did was make me dread becoming middle-aged.

[BiblioPhil · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much as I groan at people who complain about characters in novels being unlikable, these two were emotionally stunted miseries. The only good thing is that it made me want to read her poetry.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. An intelligent and rare book that achieves the portrayal of how love is built, somewhat haphazardly, from our pasts as we grope for the future. Poetic but incisive. Very much recommended.

[Paul Snelling · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s beautiful book. Poetic. Lovely writing to be savoured not devoured. Perhaps the ordinary isn’t profound, but the writing is.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a bit like Normal People in the carefully, keenly observed recording of detail. The story does have a forward momentum even though it is not high action. I liked it

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lavinia Greenlaw was clearly aware as she wrote this book that it was quite good. As a result, strange to say, In the City of Love's Sleep is laden with the contortions and embellishments that seem to be the cross borne by every self-consciously Quite Good Book.

In a paradoxical but perfectly predictable way, the same self-important overwroughtness that attends Love's Sleep as a result of being Quite Good cramps the book so much that it is, in the final accounting, little more than an All Right Book.

Perhaps this is the curse of a culture that spends its whole existence thinking about its social media performance: our texts are crafted, like our lives, to maximise their superficial Goodness in the half-second before the disembodied eye of the Consumer scrolls away.

The bones of Love's Sleep rests on a frank, coherent, and quite touching account of how two middle-aged people negotiate their histories, past traumas and present complications as they circle into a romance. This is quite clearly Greenlaw at her best: tender, unflinching, incisive. Her characters are swiftly and efficiently sketched (if perhaps a little too "designed" for my taste); their interactions are (mostly) plausible, compelling, evocative. The awkwardness of their romances and misunderstandings is heartfelt and believable. The representation of maturing children and their private thinking is especially effective. The layered telling of their pasts is partly artful and partly (non-chronological storytelling is all well and good, but surely there should be some method to the madness) irritating and opaque.

Greenlaw has, though, saddled those strong bones with a wearisome, Thoughtful-with-a-capital-T series of fragments, vignettes and asides describing (for instance) historical artefacts (a mortsafe; a bronze model skeleton) which are presumably intended to make Love's Sleep more literary, lyrical and/or—the word that forms a theme tune for this kind of self-conscious literature—"luminous". They do not work. Certainly they provide Greenlaw's text with a dreamy quality, further heightened by her pointless-but-Literary refusal to use standard punctuation or mention the name of the city (cough London) where the book is set, but beyond the basic metaphorical connection between her central character preserving artefacts and preserving herself, they deliver no meaning or value.

Had Greenlaw simply set out to a tell her story as a story, in her poetic and dreamy prose, Love's Sleep might have emerged as a distinguished (if pedestrian) chart of the complexities, sorrows and joys of love in middle age. In its effort to be something more, though, Greenlaw's book creaks and groans under the weight of its own self-important philosophy.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my god this book!

You know the feeling when you know you will want to review a book while still reading it and you keep thinking, what on earth am I going to say that will make sense, will give it enough credit and yet will keep it real and appealing?
Well, I can't, it is such a simple story, however, it is like reading poetry one moment and digging through two very ordinary lives next.

They are very unlikeable, unagreeable characters, whose flaws and bluntness make them cringe worthy most times, imperfectly perfect people whose crappy decisions make the story something in which we can all relate at some point, it is like reading people's minds, intruding in their most shameful thoughts, being first hand witnesses to how unlikeable humans can be...they do things we like to judge from outside even though we are all flawed, we are all full of shameful thoughts and feelings...and sometimes actions....we all judge what we have been taught to see as reproachable, we fail to see ourselves as we truly are though.

It is a slow story, it is never dull or repetitive, it has an ending of sorts, like life itself, it doesn't finish at the end of a chapter, their story is in progress even as I am typing this very twisted and inaccurate review.

I fell in love with so many paragraphs that I read them and reread them just to confirm the wonderful way of expressing moments, scenes and describing ordinary objects in such an utterly mesmerising way.

Is it a book for everyone? Hell no! It is a book for people like me, those who fall in love with words, moments, poetry and randomness.

[FIONA Norris · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I enjoyed Greenlaw's writing - dreamily slow-paced at times, but with occasional bursts of violent intensity, - I found it hard to really care about the two romantic leads, especially Raif, who is so emotionally stunted, apparently by the untimely death of his first wife, that he stumbles in and out of relationships with women ( poor Helen..) with bumbling abandon. Iris is a more likeable character, and her backstory -which is revealed too late, I think - goes some way to explaining the predicament she finds herself in: married to serial philanderer David, whom she would like to divorce, but who develops MS, which makes her determination to abandon him look selfish. Greenlaw, however, delivers a pat solution to this, which seems to me to be a real weakness in the story. People who hanker after romances with happy endings probably won't be disappointed.

[David Briggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some books are beyond critique or review. They live in a world of their own somewhere, out of reach of what any words can really say. So anything I do say will only diminish this book. It's - beautiful. Simple and immensely slow and totally, absolutely captivating. It's poetry in prose, and it's philosophy in a novel, and it's love at its most profound. I urge you to read it. When you do, it might go either way. It will be unlike any other book you've read. You'll either love it, as I did, or just not get it. But whatever you do, give it a try.

[Jude Hayland · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a very strange book - I am afraid I didn't enjoy it and found the two main characters unsympathetic. The style is curious with the intrusion of the writer's voice every other chapter or so as if suddenly the novel is becoming non-fiction - the writing is very poetic, as one would expect from Greenlaw, but for me does not sit well within the narrative. Perhaps I missed some key point about all this - I'm sure I did!

[Jeff Howells · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lyrical novel about love in middle age. Raif & Iris (the former a widower, still grieving and the latter separated from her sick husband) circle each other tentatively for the majority of the novel. It’s never certain that a happy ending will be in store for them.

[Panayot Gaidov · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Razor sharp and meticulous.

[Tejasdeep Singh Sehgal]

marking this early for year-in-books; i am at around 40% but i might DNF-it around 60% because its getting repetitive. its pretty short, however, so we'll see. review to come.