Perfect BEACH READS: Author Laura Barnett's top nine wonderfully quirky love stories
NEED a good book for the beach? Laura Barnett, author of The Versions of Us, recommends her top nine wonderfully quirky love stories with a difference.
Laura's new book The Versions of Us is out now and tells the wonderfully real and complicated tale of two people falling in love, but with ceratin choices sending the story in diffeernt ways.
"It is the story of a couple’s relationship, told from beginning to end, in three different ways: three love stories told in tandem, each stemming from one key moment, in which the couple might or might not meet "Laura tells Express Online.
"As I wrote, I turned to a number of amazing novels for encouragement and inspiration: novels that had also tried to tell the oldest story there is - the story of love, and the pressures life exerts on it - in new, unconventional ways. These books play with structure and form, as well as with our expectations of love, relationships, and our very concept of what a novel can be.
"Here, then, is my selection of some of the best unconventional love stories around"
NEXT: LAURA'S TOP 9 UNCONVENTIONAL LOVE STORIES
- One Day by David Nicholls
Where else to start than with David Nicholls’ fantastic novel about one couple, Emma and Dexter, whose stuttering, will-they-won’t-they relationship held most of the nation’s readers in thrall in 2009, and will surely do so for many years yet.
As you probably know, Nicholls draws out Emma and Dexter’s story over twenty years, honing in on one day per year - 15 July - as their lives pull them together, and apart. It’s a hugely audacious narrative move, and one that absolutely pays off, with the structural conceit never feeling more important than the characters, and their story.
The first time I read the novel, I devoured it in a few days - and I kept it close by while writing The Versions of Us, as an example of what to aim for. - The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters’s extraordinary 2006 love story The Night Watch begins in the late 1940s, and then moves back to its beginning in 1941. I first read the it after seeing the brilliant BBC adaptation, starring Anna Maxwell-Martin and Claire Foy, and I was immediately engrossed. I just couldn’t believe how beautifully Waters drip-fed information about her four characters, and their relationships.
There is love of all kinds here - between lovers, family members, friends, and those thrown together in the shock and awe of the London Blitz. And Waters shows so wonderfully that playing around with structure and form need not mean sacrificing an emotional connection.
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Love stories don’t get much stranger than this one. Clare and Henry first meet when he is thirty-six and she is six, and marry when she is twenty-two, and he is thirty. He has a rare genetic flaw that keeps dragging him in and out of time; she is a regular woman who just wants to live a life in which her husband doesn’t keep disappearing, or turning up at inappropriate moments, naked and afraid.
Niffenegger’s story sounds like it ought to be impossible to follow, but it isn’t: she writes so fluently that any initial confusion quickly fades. And there is, for me at least, something so interesting to be inferred about how all couples can find themselves out of sync at one time or another.
I read the book when I’d just graduated from university, knowing I wanted to write fiction. Here, I saw something special - a truly ambitious idea, expressed in a novel that was still both readable, and highly emotive. - Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler - probably my favourite author of all time - sets all her novels in and around Baltimore, where she lives. When I first started reading Tyler as a teenager, I had never been there, but I was utterly drawn in by her sense of place, and the characters that people it.
Now, I visit Baltimore often - my husband has family there - so the city, and Tyler’s characters, have come to even more vivid life. I love all her novels, but none more than Breathing Lessons, which is an unconventional love story not only in terms of structure - it is set over just one day, on which a long-married couple, Ira and Maggie Moran, are driving to a funeral - but in subject matter, too.
So many love stories focus on the passion of a first encounter and its aftermath, but Tyler is unafraid to confront love’s more workaday side: the pushes and pulls of a long relationship; the strains exerted by family, personality, and having to earn a living. It is a master class in how a novel can distil entire lives, in all their ordinary glory, onto the page.
Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart
