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A Theory of Love: A Novel
A Theory of Love: A Novel
A Theory of Love: A Novel
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A Theory of Love: A Novel

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“[This novel] is a rare find—a tempestuous modern love story with a deeply soulful heart.” —Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times–bestselling author of The Nest

Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the west coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier. Living lives that never stop moving, from their first encounter in Bermeja to marriage in London and travels to such places as Saint-Tropez, Tangier, and Santa Clara, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other.

In an effort to build his firm, Christopher leads a life full of speed and ambition with little time for Helen and even less when he suspects his business partner of illegal activity. Helen, a reluctant voyeur to Christopher’s world of power and position, searches far and wide for reporting work that will “take a bite out of her soul”—refugees in Calais, a mountain climber in Chamonix, an orphaned circus performer in Cuba. 

A Theory of Love captures the ambivalence at the center of human experience: does one reside in the familiar comforts of solitude or dare to open one’s heart and risk having it broken? Set in some of the most picturesque places in the world, this novel asks what it means to love someone.

“Richly evoked . . . with a scope and nuanced intelligence that evokes a contemporary version of the world of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.” —The National Book Review

“What is most beautiful about A Theory of Love is Thornton’s ability to make us feel deeply through setting.” —Ploughshares

“A contemplative and absorbing novel with hidden depth.” —Kirkus Reviews
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 8, 2018
ISBN9780062742728
Author

Margaret Bradham Thornton

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the author of Charleston and the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in autobiography/memoir and the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship published in 2006, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Florida.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I recently had the pleasure of hearing the author do a presentation on her work. She explained that for her, writing novels is a way of exploring questions about the human condition. If asked most could provide a definition of love, but when in a relationship it is a more complex thing incorporating who we are or think we are, and who the other is or who we think the other is.Contemporary psychology teaches that there are many limits to self understanding. I have come to think of love as a special kind of friendship.Her description of the couple loosing the sense of the boundary between their bodies while in bed seems to be part of it. Still aging brings ceertain stubornneses and personality quirks to the fore so in some ways our sense of self as unique increases. Part of love must be allowing an other to be who they are - accepting them as they are - perhaps that is what the couple is acheiving as the novel ends.The author mentioned that she wrote several different endings for the book.The ending she used has a bit of the lady and the tiger to it. The reader doesn’t know what will happen to the couple - do they have quantum entanglement.For me the test of a good story is do the charactrers become real to my mind. I would say that is true in this book. The author also says one of the reasons she writes is that she likes beautiful sentences - a good foundation for any book.

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A Theory of Love - Margaret Bradham Thornton

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