Love, Again

'Love, Again' is the story of Sarah Durham, a sixty-year-old producer and founder of a leading fringe theatre, who commissions a play based on the journals of Julie Vairon, a beautiful and wayward nineteenth-century mulatto woman. The play captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of all who take part in it. For Sarah, the change is profound - she falls in love with two younger men, one after the other, causing her to relive her own stages of growing up, from immature and infantile love (the beautiful and androgynous Bill) to the mature love, Henry.

'Love, Again' is a fierce and compelling examination of the nature and origins of love, of its remorseless ability to overwhelm and surprise us.

"This is a grand novel, boldly hewn, more literary than it declares, and yielding the occasional swooning glimpse of beauty. An encounter with a magnificent mind and temperament in artistic maturity, capable of turning her equal gaze on George Eliot"
CANDIA MACWILLIAM, 'Independent on Sunday'

"Lessing's mixture of passionate involvement and the capacity to stand back and take a long look at what was going on, or will go on, is unlike that of any novelist writing now, except perhaps Saul Bellow, and the late Anthony Burgess. 'Love, Again' grips, maddens, depresses and excites the reader from the first page to the last"
A. S. BYATT, 'The Times'

"If the nineteenth-century novel played down sex and elevated a love that could not confess its nature, and if the twentieth century has reversed this, then Lessing here achieves the great synthesis. By restoring love to the centre of the novel, Lessing has written a book that readers will love; a novel that Stendhal and Colette would have been proud to have written"
ALLAN MASSIE, 'Scotsman'

"A marvellously absorbing novel"
KATE KELLAWAY, 'Observer'