Alison Light

a-radical-romance

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The History of An English Family

Common People

Mrs Woolf and the Servants

A Radical Romance

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There are of course memoirs that do astonish and exceed our expectations of mere self-accounting: in recent years, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk; Patti Smith's various autobiographical writings; Lorna Sage's Bad Blood; and Gillian Rose's Love's Work. Alison Light's A Radical Romance now joins this select bunch of books about the self that are not simply self-regarding but truly self-exploratory

Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light

A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read

An inspiring account of the deep love between Alison Light and her late husband Raphael Samuel

Beautifully crafted...It casts a light on the lightness of love and the profound depression of loss. A truly gifted writer

She writes with precision and tenderness about loss. A Radical Romance is an admirable tribute to a man, a period of rapid change in London, and an unusual marriage

Compulsively readable. Light is a shrewd narrator . . . she reflects with careful psychological and philosophical insight on the reality of loneliness and profound loss following ten years of marriage. Light is also a poet and it shows in certain suppositions or propositions, those observations she posits in high-wire mental leaps.

Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read

Mesmeric and deeply moving

Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom

The most powerful family history I have ever read

Penelope Lively, New York Times, on Common People

A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic socialist from a very different background to Alison's working-class family. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. 
 
In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother. A Radical Romance is a luminous and deeply intelligent memoir of love and grief.

WINNER OF THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 
 
'The greatest memoirs offer all the complex shades and colours that we expect in fiction. A Radical Romance is more than just some summing-up: it is a work of art' Guardian 
 
Alison Light met the charismatic social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. 
 
Theirs was an attraction of opposites - he, twenty years her senior, from a Jewish Communist family with its roots in Russia and Eastern Europe, she from the English working class. In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. A Radical Romance is a luminous account of love and loss, and a celebration of our transformative capacity to share our lives and change our selves. 
 
'Displays her usual sharp but sympathetic appreciation of the finest gradations of culture and class' Margaret Drabble, TLS, Books of the Year 
 
'She writes with precision and tenderness about loss. A Radical Romance is an admirable tribute to a man, a period of rapid change in London, and an unusual marriage' Stephanie Merritt, Observer 
 
'Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light' Claire Tomalin

Alison Light is a writer and critic. She is an honorary professor in the Department of English at University College, London, Honorary Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh University and a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, she is the author of the much-acclaimed Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Common People, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. She lives in Oxford.

A Radical Romance

A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

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