The Lost Properties of Love

- Blurb -

This is a book about journeys and paths through life - those we choose to take and those we don't. And the difficulties of taking those steps. It is set mostly on trains. "What makes someone walk into the middle of someone else's marriage or out of the centre of their own? What makes someone end a relationship, or a life, placing their foot into the future's thin air? What makes someone start an affair?" asks Sophie Ratcliffe in The Lost Properties of Love.Part memoir, part imagined history, this book is pre-occupied with the transition from youth into middle-age and how, as Dante knew, there is something about the middle of life that makes us turn to narrative - the shape of our own stories, of our friends, and those we find in great works of literature. We draw upon all of them to make sense of our lives.What do happy families look like? What sort of life would have been lived, if a different train had been taken? In this profound and moving book, Sophie Ratcliffe, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, travels in a railway carriage with a fictional Russian socialite, commutes down the Northern Line with her father, and hovers over Paddington and New York to watch two love affairs that never quite took off. Its characters dwell on trains and telephones, sometimes get stuck in tunnels in Kings Cross, and gaze out of window onto lives that haven't been lived.Frank, intelligent and making as much use of the lives of Anna Karenina and Kate Field as of her own, this marvellous book of creative non-fiction offers an unforgettable view of the workings of the human heart.