WHAT WILL SURVIVE OF US IS LOVE

Here, rather than an individual card to each of my subscribers, is the jacket of my new novel to be published by Jonathan Cape on Feb 1, 2024. With it, I wish you all a Happy New Year!

I take the title from Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb.  That’s the one in which Larkin notes with ‘sharp tender shock’ that the entombed earl has removed his gauntlet and has been holding the countess’s hand for centuries.  The feelings defy the cold stone in which they’re expressed.  It's an elegant poem, similarly defying its own rigidity.  If you can read it and not weep a stony tear you have never held a lover’s hand.  I can’t go for long without a hand in my mine.  I’ve always been a love poet masquerading as a Rabelaisian novelist, it’s just that no one has noticed.  In my new novel – as the title suggests - I celebrate love from its first ecstatic minute to its final devotional hour and make fewer jokes than in earlier work.

Which isn’t to say I don’t make any.

When you love as intensely as the two lovers in my novel do, the chill tread of mortality is never far away. Isn’t it to conquer mortality that we who are no longer children throw ourselves into love with an ardour that younger lovers cannot match?

I was thinking of calling this novel Love and Sadness, but that would have done no justice to what I hope is its wit and energy. It remains the case, however, that it is the nearest thing to an unashamed romantic novel than anything I have done before.

It isn’t a weepie. I don’t do those. But I wept copiously while writing it. And couldn’t speak to anyone for a week when I’d finished.