A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

(Paperback)

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The extraordinary story of an unconventional marriage. A mesmerizing meditation on love and loss 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.

Reviews

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 * Guardian *
Extremely interesting, moving, brilliantly written, as one would expect from Alison Light * Claire Tomalin *
A memoir of cauterising honesty. This is a book that deserves to be widely read * Spectator *
An inspiring account of the deep love between Alison Light and her late husband Raphael Samuel * TLS *
Beautifully crafted...It casts a light on the lightness of love and the profound depression of loss. A truly gifted writer * Hugh MacDonald, The Herald *
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 * Guardian *
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. * RTE *
Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read * Observer, on Common People *
Mesmeric and deeply moving * Daily Telegraph, on Common People *
Remarkable, haunting, full of wisdom * The Times, on Common People *
The most powerful family history I have ever read * Penelope Lively, New York Times, on Common People *

Author Bio

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.