Dear Reader by Cathy Rentzenbrink

Author:Cathy Rentzenbrink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Bad Love

It is a truth universally acknowledged that love is more interesting and worthy of being written about when it goes wrong. If you meet a happily married couple at the beginning of a novel, you know they won’t be staying that way. Either one of them will be lying to the other – or they will both be lying to everyone. Deceit, adultery, obsession and betrayal work brilliantly in fiction, and some of the best novels are about the despair and disillusion caused by matters of the heart.

Talking It Over/Love, Etc by Julian Barnes

In Talking It Over, Stuart, Oliver and Gillian – the three points of a love triangle – offer their accounts of how Gillian started out being married to Stuart and ended up with Oliver. In Love, Etc we revisit them a decade later to see how things have changed. Because the story hasn’t ended, Stuart tells us. Maybe he wishes it had, ‘But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put life down the way you can put a book down.’

Heartburn by Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron was seven months pregnant with her second child when she found out that her husband was having an affair with a mutual friend. Her mother had always told her ‘everything is copy’ so she turned it into a brilliant comic novel. The edition I often reread comes with a wonderful introduction written twenty-two years later: ‘I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book – if I could just stop crying.’

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

When an American teacher meets a young man called Mitko in the toilets of the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, he becomes obsessed with his desire for him. A slender and achingly beautiful novel full of the gloriously messy pain of unrequited and inappropriate love. A little like Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, it captures the terrible truth that knowing the object of our love is unworthy does not help us to stop pining for their attention.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

‘The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness.’ The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah Miles comes to an end after a bomb falls on his flat just after they have made love. Bendrix doesn’t understand why Sarah won’t see him any more and descends into bitter jealousy. Two years later, he runs into Sarah’s husband and becomes tangled up again in his obsessive love for a woman he doesn’t understand.

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty

Respected scientist Yvonne Carmichael steps out of giving evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee and into the path of a man she finds dangerously attractive. Without considering the consequences, she has sex with him in the Chapel in the Crypt, and so begins an affair that will lead her to the dock at the Old Bailey and to the last in a long line of betrayals. I love

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