The Lost Properties of Love

by Sophie Ratcliffe

What if you could tell the truth about who you are, without risking losing the one you love? This is a book about love affairs and why we choose to have them; a book for anyone who has ever loved and wondered what it is all about.

How do you learn to be a grown-up when you’ve never got over the death of a parent? What makes a ‘happy family’? What happens if you can’t stop thinking about an ex? And what does commitment really mean?

In this genre-defying memoir, Sophie Ratcliffe travels through time, space and great literature to capture the complex and often messy nature of life, love – and grief. Beautifully crafted, painfully funny and frank about things that most people keep to themselves, The Lost Properties of Love is a game-changing exploration of the human heart.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Grief, Literature, Biography, Love

305 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 7, 2019

About the author

I write biography, fiction, memoir, criticism - and things that are a mixture of all three. You can follow me on twitter at @soratcli or on instagram @sophieratcliffeauthor

My latest book Loss, A Love Story will be out in the USA in April of this year. It came out in the UK under the title, The Lost Properties of Love.

Here's a bit about it:

A journey with the novels that shape our emotions, our romances, and ourselves

Part memoir, part imagined history, this unique personal essay depicts the intimate experience of childhood bereavement, lost love affairs, and the complicated realities of motherhood and marriage. Framed by an extended train journey, author Sophie Ratcliffe turns to the novels, novelists, and heroines who have shaped her emotional and romantic landscapes. She transports us with her to survey the messiness of everyday life, all while reflecting on steam propulsion and pop songs, handbags and honeymoons, Anna Karenina and Anthony Trollope, former lovers and forgotten muses. Frank, funny, tender, and transporting, Loss, A Love Story asks why we fall in, and out, of love—and how we might understand doing so amid the ongoing upheavals and unwritten futures of the twenty-first century.

I'm lucky enough to have had some lovely reviews....


“With this voyage into grief, longing, eros, and art, Sophie Ratcliffe offers us an intimate, beautifully curated exhibit of history, imagination, revelation, and consolation.” —Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir

“A book as much about time and technology as it is about love and grief, Loss, A Love Story is a feat of personal narrative. Sophie Ratcliffe crosses genre borders and traverses boundaries, both imagined and real, reminding us with each movement that a lived life is less a framed photograph than it is a moving train, ferrying us forward in space while also pulling us back in time. This book swept me away.” —Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories

‘An ingeniously constructed tribute to messy relationships’ Prospect Magazine, Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2019

'An intricate, fiercely intelligent memoir.’ Observer

‘Booksellers needn't fret about where to shelve this limpid, funny, haunting meditation on love, loss and parenting: just put it on your best tables and watch it fly’ Patrick Gale

‘Magnificent… glorious on the journeys of life, love and loss, stirringly intimate, deeply painful, occasionally hilarious. It deserves to do brilliantly.’ Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

‘Deeply moving … Sophie Ratcliffe has rummaged in her heart and produced a memoir of books, trains, love and grief. If you have ever lost an umbrella, an earring or someone close to you, you have found your book.’ Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously

‘A mesmerising book about the messiness of life, love and marriage, and the pain of losing the one you love … raw, truthful, witty and occasionally sublime.’ Paula Byrne, bestselling author of The Real Jane Austen

‘Sophie Ratcliffe brings a breathtaking honesty and a cool precision to her imaginative meditation on the lessons of Anna Karenina – it is a true tour de force which is both moving and exhilarating to read.’ Rosamund Bartlett, author of Tolstoy: A Life and the translator of Anna Karenina

‘A lovely, intricate book and devastatingly honest. I think every truthful person will find themselves mirrored here.’ Craig Raine

'Wonderful and highly individual … The pages crackle with her cleverness and she has a genius for concision … Witty and original, but also human.' Spectator

‘A compelling and very honest book. At times it made me think of Tracey Emin’s bed! So many of the details and detritus of a life arranged in a work of art.’ Neil Tennant musician and co-founder of the Pet Shop Boys




I'm an Professor at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, where I teach literature.

Reviews

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book. It's part memoir, part meditation, part literary exploration, part biography. There's a lot going on, and this could be too much, except here, with the author's skill at weaving all these parts together, it really isn't. It's a fascinating look at love, loss, grief and memory. It's funny and sad and honest and whole hearted and I found myself fascinated and from time to time thinking 'oh, I do that' or 'that's me'. It's a book that is uniquely its own. I think it will be hard to shelve and quantify and it runs the risk of being overlooked because of that, which is a shame, because it's one of the best things I've read this year.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not your average memoir. For one thing, it ends with 34 pages of notes and bibliography. Sophie Ratcliffe is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford, and it’s clear that her life and the narrative have been indelibly shaped by literature. In this work of creative nonfiction she is particularly interested in the lives and works of Leo Tolstoy and Anthony Trollope and the women they loved. For another, the book is based around train journeys – real and fictional, remembered and imagined. Trains are appropriate symbols for many of the book’s dichotomies: scheduling versus unpredictability, having or lacking a direction in life, monotony versus momentous events, and fleeting versus lasting connections.

Each chapter, marked with a location and a year, functions as a mini-essay; as the nonchronological pieces accrete you develop a sense of what have been the most important elements of Ratcliffe’s life. One was her father’s death from cancer when she was 13, an early loss that inevitably affected the years that followed. Another was a love affair with a married photographer 30 years her senior. A number of chapters are addressed directly to this ex-lover in the second person. Although they’ve had no contact since she got married, she still thinks about him – and wonders if she’ll have a right to mourn him when he dies.

Could she have been his muse, as Kate Field was for Trollope? Field appeared in fictional guises in much of his work and thereby inspired Anna Karenina, for Tolstoy was a devoted reader of Trollope and gave his heroine a penchant for reading English novels, too. Ratcliffe seems to see herself in Anna, a wife and mother who longs for a life of her own: she writes of her love for her two children but also of the boredom that comes with motherhood’s minutiae.

Much of life’s daily tedium is bound up in physical objects, like the random objects that litter the cover. “I am a lover of small things – and of clutter,” Ratcliffe confesses. She notes that generations of literary critics have asked what was in the red handbag Anna Karenina left behind, too. What does such lost property say about its owner? What can be saved from a life in which loss is so prevalent? These are questions the book explores through its metaphors, stories and memories. It ends with the hope that writing things down gives them meaning.

If you enjoy nonstandard memoirs (like Jean Hannah Edelstein’s This Really Isn’t About You) and books about how what we read makes us who we are (such as Samantha Ellis’s How to Be a Heroine and Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm), you have a real treat in store here.

Some favorite lines:

“Life is in the between-ness, the space in the margins – not in the headlines.”

“Books, like trains, are another way of tricking time, of moving to a different beat, a different space.”

“Has my reading been a way of keeping me company – of helping me through the worlds of nearlys and barelys and the feelings of missing, and the hopeless messiness?”

“Writing is better than nothing. Better than thin air.”


Originally published, with images, on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written book about love, told in quite a unique way

This is part memoir, part fiction. It did take me a while to work out which was which though.

The main focus of this book is love, but also touches on grief, death and love of things like literature and reading.

I thought this book was incredibly well written. It was very poetic and delicate. Perhaps maybe too flowery for me, I couldn't always understand some of the points being made.

I gave this 3 stars, not because I thought it was a bad book but because I didn't really connect with the main messages, apart from of course loving books.

I think people in their 30s or 40s would really appreciate this book.

Overall, this was very well written but I just couldn't connect to some parts

TW: grief and suicide

[Rocío G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A quietly beautiful and surprisingly intimate meditation on the details of life's daily messes. With stark honesty and translucent prose, Ratcliffe ruminates on the way little things build up to disapointments, joys, boredom and self-making. The narrative, which interweaves Ratcliffe's retelling of her life with extended meditations on the significance of clutter, the underpinnings of affairs, Tolstoy's Anna Karennina and Trollope's novels, by way of his elusive muse Kate Field, is framed by train journeys. The constant travel between stations in each subsection, 'Leamington to Banbury', 'Moscow to St. Petersburg', fictional, real and imagined, gives the reader the unsettling sense of being always on the move, never quite at home, which meshes well with Ratcliffe's themes of loss, love, regret and unexpectedness. A thoroughly engrossing and deeply stirring read, this book is a testament to the way we frame and give meaning to our lives through stories: the ones we read and the ones we build out of the clutter of our experience.

[Jayne Harrison]

I thought this was a beautiful book! A cleverly woven account of a very personal and moving experience of childhood loss, entwined with reflections of literary works, train journeys near and far, memories of lost love and musings on modern motherhood. I also loved the references to some classic 80s tunes which brought back my own memories of being a teenager at this time. I would highly recommend this book and look forward to future work by the author. With thanks to Harper Collins for my advance reader copy.

[Tara Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not really sure what to say, or what I think about this book. It is beautifully written. It is enjoyable to read. I feel ignorant for never having read Anna Karenina and think I need to read it sometime. So many of the observations on motherhood and its incompatibility with serious work rhymes really true for me. I think the passage about her Loss is beautiful. As a doctor, I recognise this loss as a familiar version of a character who appears in so many of my patients’ lives.

So far so good. So why not 5 stars? It’s just not. (Sorry). I can imagine maybe others would enjoy it but I can’t ever imagine recommending it to anyone. It is very self indulgent in places (and rightly so as I suspect that writing it has been a sort of therapy for the author). Is it so prudish to say that I feel a bit uncomfortable for her children if they ever read this? Clearly everyone’s parents have had both a life before kids and a sex life, most probably including other people before they met each other, however I can’t imagine a teenage child of the author’s coping with finding out about her past (which may of course be fictionalised here). Then I question my own liberal morals, do I have any right to criticise an author for being open/honest? Are her children any of my business? In fact how dare I judge her mothering based on the writing of this book.... and so actually it has made me think, a lot, but maybe not in the way it’s designed to. (And top marks for the Kate Gross bit, one of the best memoirs/books I have ever read and it made me happy to think Sophie Ratcliffe had liked it too).

[Jacky Chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. There is no other way of putting it.

[Jules]

DNF.
I don’t understand the references - geographical or literary, the blending of fiction and real life is confusing and I’m not compelled to persist. Felt like reading a train timetable and sneaking looks at the commuter’s dull books, but only catching snippets.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you could read once a decade and feel like you were reading a completely different book each time. Sophie Ratcliffe has a way of making you think about your own life by being so open about her own.
I occasionally lost the writer's train of thought, which is why this is a 4/5 for me, but loved the use of trains as a metaphor (who doesn't love a train) and the way she wove in the stories of other women throughout.

[Richard Butchins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing in this book is skilful and belies the books simple style. It follows a current theme of using train journeys in literature. Perhaps because they represent the last vestige of the lost art of travelling. Train travel becomes a mysterious synonym for life because in all other ways travel has become mundane and banal and therefore is missing any of the delight it may (or may not) have possessed. This book restores some of that mystery and in so doing it makes the reader care about the central character and her familiar enigmas. There are phrases of sheer joy and brilliance in these pages. The story does not tell one anything new or unknown or at least, it did not introduce me to a world I previously knew nothing about. But I found the writers perspective both engaging and illuminating. There are literary references mixed in with a deep and personal tale as befits the authors academic status and I will be surprised if it doesn't get a positive critical reception. In regard to the "lost properties" it is a clever device and although I never recovered my own misplaced bag from TFL it's good to know I'm not alone in losing things. Overall it's exceptional writing and well worth reading.

(I received a review copy of this book)

[Jo Duffin-Skipsey · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. I've read some of the other reviews that mention the beautiful writing style and how the various aspects of the book intertwine, but for me there was no fluidity in the writing. I didn't find the story engaging and struggled not to glaze over during my attempts to read it and eventually gave up. I found the mixture of fiction and non-fiction confusing.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that looks at what is lost on many levels. Through references to “Anna Karenina” and the novels of Anthony Trollope, this is a book of missed things and the habit of living in a mess. A mixture of short bursts of thought and longer accounts of the messiness of contemporary life, this is an honest reckoning of everything from the contents of handbags to children’s need for fish fingers. The clever use of language throughout this book renders even the most trivial meaningful, and the touching memorable. The minute experiences of train travel is linked to the fictional account of Anna’s, as those who read are seen as symbolic of all readers who can lose themselves in a book. Not a novel, but lots of ideas and reminiscences of life and love, both married and lover, things lost and found. This is a book that looks at Kate Field, mysterious muse of Anthony Trollope, as well as the behaviour of a teenager bereaved at the death of a father. It is the importance of objects in our lives which speak of lives lived, and particularly those cut short, as everyone seems to be on a journey. The subtitle of this book, “An Exhibition of Myself” reveals the painfully honest nature of this text, and the curious mixture of sophistication and sorrow which runs throughout. I was intrigued and pleased to be given the opportunity to read and review this unique book.

“All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is a quotation from Tolstoy that will run throughout the book. Not that Ratcliffe’s family is unhappy, but she knows of the constant demands of children, of family life, and regards time away on her own as an opportunity to be messy in her own way. The magic of photography reveals so much over the years, from the first experiments with chemicals and glass, through to the occupation of a mysterious lover who takes many photographs. Travel on the underground has its own memories of complicated journeys to school in the company of her beloved father, whose early death haunts the book. As she thinks about his briefcase, left empty of the everyday things he carried, the echo is of the objects which include a bag which she has seen in the Tolstoy museum. More significantly she details the ideas of handbags, the bags carried by women who include Anna, Ratcliffe’s own mother, and Radcliffe herself. The difficulties of finding a bag which will contain all the necessities as well as all the things that accumulate, especially when travelling with children, is particularly significant. The book which can be carried, is indeed carried by Anna, is important, especially when that book is an imaginary Trollope novel, which brings the text back to the enigmatic Kate Field. She worked to advertise the newly manufactured telephone, which reminds Radcliffe of her use of the old fashioned phone as a teenager.

As Forster emphasised in his novel, this is a book of the vital importance of connections, the links with the past and the present, the mess and the slender chains which connect memories via objects, places with people. This book looks at literature, films and the things that are lost, whether today or long ago, and what they all mean to our lives. This is an unusual book which has a unique format, which soon becomes absorbing. Ratcliffe draws in so many elements that a reread will be necessary to really begin to tie up all the strands. I recommend this as a challenging read which is essentially the story of a life in all its complexity and messy reality.

[Otterly Bookish · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Perhaps all of us hide our lives in fiction. Many books are love letters. Perhaps this one is too. For the more you look into any book the more secrets it contains.”

This is one of the most unique books I have read in some time. Part memoir, part literary discussion and part mediation on love. The author allows us to dive deep into her subconscious, sharing with us her most intimate desires, fears and secrets. You might not always like her or think that she says the right things, but this is a beautifully written and thought-provoking read.

It would be simply impossible to summarise all the things that the author writes about. Part of the joy, at least for me, in reading this was meandering along the authors thoughts. I wouldn’t want to ruin some of the surprising twists and turns. Like her literary hero Tolstoy she is obsessed by detail and what the details of life says about a person.

There is a lot here about loss and love. However it was the way that the writer captures the magic of great literature. Not only does she discuss Tolstoy and Trollope with intelligence and insight, but she talks about the power books have to play with time.

“Books, like trains, are another way of tricking time, of moving to a different beat, a different space.”

In her musing on the choices we make in life (and those we subsequently can’t make) she sums up the dilemma faced by all bookworms.

“A pile of books live next to my bed, gathering dust and regret. For each book that we read, there’s another we don’t begin.”

[Michelle Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful discovery - a beautiful book that needed to be finished in one sitting - a journey through life, lost opportunities, alternative journeys and death. The partings that happen too soon, the misunderstandings, that what-ifs, the what might-have-beens. The affairs that happen in reality, the ones where we step back from the edge just in time and those we undertake every time we pick up a book and disappear into a different world. Part memoir and part imaginings of the journeys of Kate Field - an American journalist, actress and friend/possible lover of Antony Trollope - and Anna Karenina, as well as that of the author; the death of her father when she is 13, the wild-child years, the affair with a married man which haunts ghost-like.

Tolstoy adored Trollope, Trollope adored Kate Field. Could Tolstoy have been inspired by Kate Field when he created Anna? She certainly appeared in books by Trollope over and over again. Was Anne reading Trollope on her train journeys between Moscow and St Petersburg? Written on a series of train journeys, there's always a sense of impending doom. After all we know that Anna ultimately falls under the train, but what of Kate and the author?

Definitely one to keep on my shelf and to dip into for a little of the beauty, pain and longing.

[Ami-May · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young Sophie loses her father to cancer and this sets her life feeling like she lost such a big loss, she is looking for her loss everywhere and anywhere she goes. How much one loss can affect your life and even

This is half fiction and half true account of this authors life, her thoughts, secrets, love, affairs, loss and illness\disease etc

She shares her love of literacy mainly through Anna Karenina and Kate FieldCharacters. And she talks about how her life has many similarities to the characters above.

It is a shorter and a quick read coming in at just under 260 pages. It is excellentlywritten.

Each chapter is a train journey from all different place.

But even though it is a short read, you will need to sit somewhere quiet to absorb Sophies funny and brilliant words.

It is honest, funny and thought-provoking.

A book that will be perfect for those who have loved and lost, who loves positivity, honesty, sometimes Laugh out Loudtellings and mother/parenthood.

A book that is thought-provoking, feel-good, emotive in so many ways, from different kinds of love and grief.

A book for looking back at the past, the memories, who love books and travelling.

Who loves fiction and memoirs who want something a little different to dive into.

[abi slade · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

pros ✅
- a fun bonus of buying second hand: accidental signed copy
- LOVE that the contents page was written like a train timetable
- insightful. manages to cover the intersect between travel, womanhood, humanity, luggage, memory, private vs public, being lost, destinations in relationships, adultery, motherhood, mess
- very good pacing
- very poetic (just what i craved after the last one…)
- enjoyed how the kate/anna historical subplots linked and coincided with her life
- “writing was an affirmation of selfhood,” (234) lovely
- thought provoking

cons ❌
- probably a bit forgettable in the long run
- a bit confused at points
- despite the autobiographical nature, it felt like the sense of narrator got a bit lost? there was so much time spent on kate/anna and also such sensoring of the names in Ratcliffe’s real life that i didn’t get enough of Ratcliffe’s reality and her life

[Sarah Maguire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A personal hit, but I can see it being a miss for many others. It follows the narrator's thoughts as she travels south by train to Oxford. As thoughts will, hers wander through the great loves and losses of her life. She writes of herself with an openness which sometimes borders on brutal in its honesty. She writes of pain, guilt, being betrayed, betraying others, needing, yearning, wanting, fearing - I'm sure I cannot be the only reader who sometimes felt as if she'd wrenched me open and stolen my words.
There is also, interwoven, a series of insights into Anna Karenina - and especially her red handbag - worth the read for these alone.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so unique, written by the author about her own life, while also including literary characters, while flicking back and forth between dates! I loved how different it was to what I usually read. The author really did write everything with such honesty and I really admired that. There was just so much raw and honest emotion throughout the whole book. It was so relatable in so many aspects and I particularly related to the author losing a parent and the grief she experiences, I was just reading thinking how similar that is to me.
It's such a well written, honest and relatable memoir.
I was concerned I would get confused as the timeline flicks back and forth but I didn't at all!

[Sandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sophie Ratcliffe’s account of her life but where she ‘has also played the biographer, reimagined other people’s imaginings, conjectured alternative lives and wandered into fiction.’ The author sums it up as an ‘exhibition of kinds.’
Lots to love in this book. A frank and intimate exploration of how we live with the madness and complexity of love and grief. Trains and journeys, childhood bereavement, relentless marriage and parenthood, adultery, Anna Karenina and Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope and Kate Field, books and reading, handbags and messiness fill the pages. Enjoyed but felt a more curated exhibition may have made a more meaningful story.

[Alan Shaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another one of those books that goes straight on to my re-reading list. Ms. Ratcliffe writes
beautifully and affectingly, and from the opening sentence drew me in.

The book, for me, has a rather melancholy air about it - but then the matter of the book - loss of love, paths not taken, what-ifs - all lend themselves to melancholia. That doesn't mean that the book is in any way depressing - far from it - it is warm and witty, chatty and interesting - as well as being honest and brave and full of heart and heart-searching and wise.

If indeed I was to find myself on a long train journey with Ms. Ratcliffe sitting next to me I would be delighted with her takes on Anna Karenina (not a favourite heroine of mine mind you) and Trollope's muse Kate Field -as well as for glimpses through the windows of her own life.

We all undoubtedly have lost things in our lives - people, opportunities, loves - Ms. Ratcliffe has shared some of hers in this book and I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed being taken on this journey.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting after I read an excerpt in The Times yet I really enjoyed it! Although I do not share her opinion on bags (I love them) I thought it was beautifully written and loved how the different aspects were woven together. I also enjoyed her describing her tube journey to school as it is nearly the exact journey I take to and from work (Archway to Colindale) and read on most journeys.

[Juliet Rosenfeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary book, hard to pin down, hard to not think about. I listened to it on Amazon audible, at one point walking near where some of the story takes place in North West London. It is a beautiful, strange and powerful book. To call it honest or revelatory diminishes how clever and unusual it is. How sad and insightful it is. Wonderful, shocking unlikely and innovative - I wonder what Sophie Ratcliffe will write next.

[Rebecca Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good, pensive read filled with universal anecdotes, as well as Ratcliffe’s personal stories and allusions to Trollope, Nabakov and Tolstoy. I wouldn’t have known that from the cover. Honestly thought there would be a story about a tampon and a fishfinger.

Think this is one I will revisit and share. It was like reading a selection of short stories with a loosely connected thread, sharing themes.

Worth the read

[LISA · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just did not get it...

I found it very hard work to read, as the prose is so disjointed and linked to the authors and books (it took me ages to realise there were more than one) and the narrators life too

The story and the characters just did not grab me, it felt like if I had done background reading of the book I could have studied it.. but someone would have had to make me do it - and it would have pissed me off

Feels like it is trying to be a future literary study book, eventually discovered the story - she was having an affair with a photographer - and so mirrored Kate Fields and Anna? I think stopped paying attention by the end to be honest!

[Kerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

For whatever reason, I was surprised by just how good this memior is. It's "brave enough to show the stuff within us all.” Plus it has THIRTEEN pages of suggested further reading and sources on topics like Tolstoy (Sofia and Leo both), Kate Field, love and marriage, trains, reading, writing, and space and time.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were some really lovely bits in this book. I loved how trains connected each part of the memoir and her reflections of Anna Karenina and work of Anthony Trollope. I found these parts really relatable as she discussed loss, love, tedium, and fleeting moments.

This is not something I would have picked up if I spotted it in a book store so thanks to A Box of Stories for this one.

[Readelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recieved this as part of my box of stories subscription. I have found the box of stories selections more miss than hit, but this one is a keeper. I would never have chosen it for myself, but it was the book I needed right now.

It is an interesting reflection on grief, loss, relationships. Hard to describe, but leaves a strong impression.

[Tara Faherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had lots of great elements and obviously a beautiful grasp of literature and language. However, it fell short for me. It didn't quiet achieve any of the depth that I felt it was reaching for. I also didn't love the spoilers for Anna Karenina which it being a classic was probably fair enough.

[Richard Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing sort-of autobiography that features the death of a parent, a remembered love affair, and a passion for Trollope and Tolstoy.

My blog on the book:

https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...

[Helen Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lost Properties of Love is addictive from start to end. It is beautifully contemplated and recorded. I melted blissfully into Sophie Ratcliffe's evocative account of her life. It left me wanting much more. I am grateful to Harper Collins for the Advance Reading copy of this book.