Love's Work

Gillian Rose

£9.99

We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.

To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.


Penguin Books Ltd
14 March 2024
ISBN: 9780241645499
Paperback
112 pages

From the publisher

'This small book contains multitudes' Marina Warner
'For those who have suffered for and in love, this may prove to be one of the most useful books they will ever read' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian


An extraordinary, uncompromising and consoling celebration of a life - through childhood, faith, family, love, friendship, pain and loss - written as its author was facing her own mortality

Gillian Rose was a star academic, acclaimed as one of the most dazzling and original thinkers of her time. Told that she had incurable cancer, she found a new way to explore the world and herself. Tender, heartbreakingly honest and written with moments of surprising humour, Love's Work is the exhilarating result.

In this short, unforgettable memoir, Rose looks back on her childhood, from the young dyslexic girl, torn between father and stepfather, to the adolescent confronting her Jewish inheritance. As an adult, Gillian Rose proves herself a passionate friend, a searcher for truth, a woman in love and, finally, an exacting but generous patient.

Intertwining the personal and the philosophical, Rose meditates on faith, conflict and injustice; the fallibility and endurance of love; our yearning for independence and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ('I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,' Rose writes) and with unsettling wisdom ('To live, to love, is to be failed'), Love's Work asks the unanswerable question: how is a life best lived?