Young Love

Jane was eleven when her mother first disappeared from her life. Though her youth was spent in search of dependability, by the time she had graduated from music college and found her footing in London, she had built a life that mostly makes sense, complete with a place in a string quartet, a growing reputation, and a flat where she keeps everything in its place. Then Ted, a childhood friend, reappears, and with him, everything she has kept at a careful distance.

Moving between a Devon childhood, the socialites of Oxford, and the subtle intensities of adult London, Young Love braids together three lives at the moment when love, in all its forms, is most wildly in flux. It is a novel about all the forms love takes before we know what to call it, the love of a child for an unreliable parent; the love between friends who never quite say so; the love that is really longing, or grief, or the simple need for a body close to one’s own.

Leaf Arbuthnot writes about ordinary feeling with uncommon precision: tenderly, drily, and with the rare conviction that the small emotional facts of a life are worth every word.