Sophie Mackintosh – author of Booker nominee The Water Cure and the Women’s Prize longlisted Cursed Bread – has made her name with surreal, eerie fiction that probes the darker edges of human relationships. Her latest book Permanence, however, turns more directly towards a love story, offering a novel that is as strange and dreamlike as it is tender, reports BritPanorama.
Here, she shares her own favourite books about love, the ones that prove the most powerful love stories are often the most unexpected…
A sport and a pastime by James Salter
“Slim and hypnotic, A Sport and a Pastime contains some of the all-time great sex writing, as well as forensically examining both the obsessiveness and precariousness of desire. Following a young couple – a well-heeled American and his beautiful, more provincial, French girlfriend – as they travel through France together, hotel to hotel, it also has an intriguing narrative premise.
“Rather than being told by either member of the couple, the 1967 novel is narrated by an acquaintance of theirs, an older and more wistful man who sees in them the promise of young love, who experiences a kind of envy of the oblivious American and the experiences he is partaking in. The lines between what is real and what is imagined are blurred, thanks to this ingenious conceit; it’s an imagining, a fantasy, as much as an account of a relationship. But then, how much of love is a fiction anyway?”
Picador, £10.99
The end of the affair by Graham Greene
“Incredibly intense, passionate, and taking an unexpectedly moving (for me, at least) religious turn, The End of the Affair is concerned with the darker, more obsessive side of love. When Maurice bumps into the woman who broke off their affair two years ago, Sarah, his jealousy is sparked and he decides to hire a detective to follow her. But as we get Sarah’s side of the story, we realise things are not quite as they seem.
“Greene captures vividly the sense of being consumed by lust and yearning, as well as its spiritual dimension: the relationship with Sarah seems necessarily doomed, even in his recollection of more euphoric times.”
Vintage Classics, £9.99
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
“When Katharina receives a box of documents from a former lover who has just died, we are transported back into the story of their relationship – one that spans personal and political upheavals over the next years, the disillusionment of their relationship mirrored in the collapse of East Germany, and the rapid reconfiguration of everything they know.
“It’s agonising in its depiction of betrayal, of how a great love can become something that warps and destroys everything around it, and the prose is rendered with such beauty and precision. It completely broke my heart.”
Granta, £9.99
Happy all the time by Laurie Colwin
“Something (deceptively) lighter can be found in Happy All the Time, the book I turn to most during times of romantic despair. In this novel, beautiful people fall in love, overcome minor difficulties, and ultimately live happily ever after in their own ways. The textures and details are stunning, from the enigmatic Holly’s iconic accessorising (‘She was wearing coral earrings the size of tuxedo studs and nothing else’), to the stylish interiors of the apartments in which their small dramas play out.
“But summing it up so glibly risks doing it a disservice, because as well as being enormously comforting it’s also captivating, sharp, and very acute on the sexual and social mores of 1970s New York – as well as speaking to more eternal philosophical concerns on what it means to be loved, and to love well in return.”
W&N Essentials, £10.99
Monkey grip by Helen Garner
“Told in crystalline vignettes, Monkey Grip follows young mother Nora as she navigates life in bohemian 70s Melbourne, moving from communal house to communal house and reckoning with her powerful love for the heroin-addicted Javi. Non-moralising in how Nora’s complex relationship with Javi is portrayed, as well as being a beautiful snapshot of mothering and living, it’s a radical novel of sharp sun-soaked images, distilled down to its essence.
“I love how freely love is given in this novel, whether platonic, familial or romantic; there is much hurt, but there is a sense of possibility, too, and motherhood doesn’t render the desirous Nora remotely invisible.”
W&N Essentials, £10.99
Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh (£18.99) is published by Hamish Hamilton
