A Short Book About Love

When my not-quite-a-novel-well-sort-of A Short Book About Love was published by Seren in 2001 it was described by a reviewer in The Independent on Sunday as “profound, warm and witty” and Boyd Tonkin also declared in The Independent: “this multi-faceted jewel is a reader’s delight”.  Not long after publication it was on the shelves of Blackwell's in Charing Cross Road where a table groaning with books about love had also been set up in the run-up to St Valentine's Day. Needless to say A Short Book About Love was not amongst them. After all, with a title like that why would it be?  Always a friend of booksellers I lifted one off the shelves myself and added it to the 14th February display (someone needs to write an article about this phenomenon of gratuitous acts of charity by authors to booksellers, especially where their own books are concerned; it is always heartwarming to hear of it and most authors have similar tales to tell).

I was, therefore, delighted, in Facebook parlance,  to be invited to take part in an event on Thursday 12th February at Modern Art Oxford on the theme of love where I will be talking about the book and reading from it.  I will have copies with me and would be happy to sign a copy for you.

The book weaves together three strands: a light-hearted re-telling of the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseut, a series of short reflections [that's the 'multi-faceted' bit] on the theme of love, and fragments of fictionalised Liverpudlian autobiography from a character called Felix who can reasonably be identified with the author.

This was great fun to write and in its digressive, amusing (I hope!) and slightly mad way it was the sort of book I always wanted to write and would do so again if the ludic were a little more popular in 2015 with publishers than it is.

If you can't come to Oxford then you can buy it from Seren or even from Amazon at the exacting price, fourteen years on from publication, of £0.01 – worth every penny, I should say!