Shortlisted for the Spread the Word : Books to Talk About 2008.
A debut novel about relationships and love and the difficulties in not expressing that love. Many themes come up in the book especially of regret and loss. Despite the sad sounding premise this is an incredibly moving book.
When human beings don't talk about love, things go wrong.
If a mother had told her daughter that she loved her, they might not have spent years apart. If a man had found the courage to tell a woman that he loved her she might never have married another man. And if a father had told his daughter that he loved her when her mother died, she might not have suffered the breakdown that caused the rift with her own daughter.
But if you are born into a family that never talks about love, how do you learn to say the words?
SPEAKING of LOVE is a novel about what happens when people who love each other don’t say so. It deals passionately and honestly with human breakdown. And it tells of our need for stories and how stories can help make sense of the random nature of life.