Love and the Novel

It is a clever, well-written book, and I often found myself underlining whole paragraphs as I read. ... wonderfully insightful ... I've never read accounts of any of these texts that manage to be at once so searching and so wondrously concise, and Lupton made me want to go back to them all -- Rachel Cooke * Observer *
I adored this book. An elegant, unflinching look at what it means to grapple with the true implications of our desire. -- Keiran Goddard, author * Hourglass *
An utterly addictive - sometimes caustic, sometimes tender - account of a midlife lurch in a new direction. -- Marina Benjamin, author * The Middlepause *
Tina Lupton's eloquent account of an unexpected real-life plot twist marries critical prowess and a gripping story, in an honest and fantastically insightful book. -- Laura Kipnis, author of 'Love in the Time of Contagion'
Lupton's unsparing memoir forces us to re-examine the lives lived on our bookshelves and in our heads. -- Leah Price, author of 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Books'
A subversive, brilliant and beautifully written book about love, play and power in fiction and in the well-read life -- Sarah Moss
Such a rich exploration of love in all its forms (marital, adulterous; for children, friends). I love how Christina Lupton summons an iconic cast of our favourite fictional lovers ... even as her own desires carry her far beyond many of their teachings. A delicious combination of critical thought and passionate personal experience. -- Tanya Shadrick, author of 'The Cure for Sleep'
In this eloquent, captivating conversation between memoir and criticism, Christina Lupton also offers a mesmerizing love song to the experience of reading in its own right. -- David James, author of Discrepant Solace
Do novels help us know how to love? Is middle-aged passion worth upending your life and stability for? Instead of turning to shrinks to solve our romantic travails, clearly we should be turning to literature professors. Tina Lupton's eloquent account of an unexpected real-life plot twist marries critical prowess and a gripping story, in an honest and fantastically insightful book. -- Laura Kipnis, author of 'Love in the Time of Contagion'
Interspersing self-examination with an equally gripping analysis of the texts that have made and remade their reader, Lupton's unsparing memoir forces us to re-examine the lives lived on our bookshelves and in our heads. -- Leah Price, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books
What happens when you fall in love and discover in yourself such urgency to be with your beloved that you overturn all the certainties and structures of your life? What next?This haunting and highly personal account is studded with memorable insights into dozens of the novels about love and loss that long shaped Lupton's professional and personal life, but its true contribution is to show us how and why even the most impassioned reader can't ultimately take novels as a blueprint for living. -- Jenny Davidson, author of 'Reading Styles: A Life in Sentences'
A memoir, as formidably intelligent as it is forcefully felt, about a life spent reading about love, which turned out to be the best preparation for letting "the pleasure of all scripts fall away" and discovering how to love differently -- Kevin Brazil, author of ‘What Ever Happened to Queer Happiness?’
Love and the Novel is an utterly addictive - sometimes caustic, sometimes tender - account of a midlife lurch in a new direction. As Christina Lupton falls in love with a woman and contemplates turning her family's world upside down, she learns that life, like fiction, is far from linear. In so far as it lends itself to fictional plotting, it is a place of many rooms. I loved Lupton's bold reading of the defining events in her life through the literature she loves and teaches - each book a gateway to self-revelation, and sometimes transformation. -- Marina Benjamin, author * The Middlepause *