MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
IN BYRON’S WAKE by Miranda Seymour
(S&S £12.99 560 pp ) PERHAPS to onlookers, all marriages seem mysterious, but few are more perplexing than that of the poet Lord Byron and his unfortunate wife, Annabella Milbanke.
The rakish author and the prim young heiress met in 1812 at a party held by Byron’s lover, Lady Caroline Lamb. After their introduction, Byron wrote: ‘I should like [Annabella] more if she were less perfect’.
For her part, Annabella thought Byron ‘a very bad, very good man’. There followed one of the least enthusiastic courtships in literary history, during which Byron was carrying on a passionate affair with his half-sister, Augusta.
After barely a year, their marriage collapsed amid lurid accusations of Byron’s sexual excesses. However, it produced a daughter, Ada, a mathematical genius, famous for her work on an early form of computer.
This biography illuminates the lives of two intriguing women whose reputations have been unjustly eclipsed by Lord Byron’s fame.
THE ONLY STORY by Julian Barnes
(Vintage £8.99, 224 pp ) JULIAN BARNES’S novel begins with the question: ‘Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?’ It isn’t, his narrator points out, a real question, ‘because we don’t have the choice . . . Who can control how much they love?’
The Only Story recounts the relationship between the narrator, Paul, and his first (and only) love, Susan.
The setting is South London suburbia, more than 50 years ago, where Paul, home from university for the summer, is ‘visibly and unrepentantly bored’.
His exasperated mother suggests he join the local tennis club and, in a spirit of satire, he agrees. There, he finds himself paired for a game with Susan Macleod, who is 48 and married.
Afterwards, he offers her a lift home and, over the summer, they fall in love.
Barnes’s novel chronicles their romance with an austere tenderness.
EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE by Dolly Alderton
(Penguin £8.99, 368 pp) ‘THE older you get, the more baggage you carry. When you date at 25, everyone walks into the bar with a very neat, light carry-on. From 30 on, get ready to meet someone with 250kg of rucksacks brimming with history, complications and demands.’
Dolly Alderton’s bestselling memoir considers love and its complications from the perspective of a 30-year-old with a slightly jaded dating history (she is a former dating columnist for a Sunday newspaper).
But her very funny (and at times heartbreaking) book is about much more than romantic love. It is a vivid chronicle of millennial experience: growing up in the suburbs, the potent (sometimes noxious) charm of social media and, above all, female friendship.