The Languages of Love

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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 one's own". The characters are many and varied, including Bernard, Julia's 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 fool's 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