The Languages of Love

Twenty-nine year old Julia Grampion has just received her doctorate at London University but life is looking rather dismal. Her affair with Paul has ended and she drifts to a relationship with Bernard learning a different and changeable idiom of love learning how language disguises the shifting uncertainties of the human ties that bind. The story is set in a cosmopolitan 1950s London featuring university departments the Reading Room of the British Museum espresso bars and little Soho restaurants publishers parties and a Bloomsbury room of ones own. The characters are many and varied including Bernard Julias new lover a sensual cultured and selfish academic with a learned French wife Nicolette; Paul charming and still in love with Julia devoted and unwilling or unable to transgress the laws of his Church; East African student Hussein passionate and intelligent simple and prompt with Sanuri proverbs like a sudden and refreshing oasis appearing in the desert of the arid London life that express his love for the beautiful Georgina. A first novel of drollery and intelligence marking the arrival of the unrivalled and extraordinary talent of Christine Brooke-Rose. She is a scholar and a wit and her first novel is delightful. She turns pedantry into a fools bladder.-JOHN DAVENPORT The Observer Miss Brooke-Rose is a new novelist worth watching.-Evening Standard Among women novelists of the post-war generation Iris Murdoch Elizabeth Jane Howard and Christine Brooke-Rose make a formidable trio.-Church Times She takes a splendid swipe at her go-getting cultural profiteers . . . she has also drawn a most devastating picture of cosy spiritual smugness among the elite.-PETER GREEN Daily Telegraph