Conversations on Love

Written By Linda Malek

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

Reviewed by Linda
📘📘📘📘


Thank you to @rachidabenamarldn for putting this on my radar.
There’s a lot to unpack in this collection of anecdotes, stories and interviews with people about what love means to them, what impact it has on their lives and how to express it. In the English language the word love is thrown around sparingly almost to the point where it loses its meaning and becomes trivialised - I think this contributes to the difficulty in understanding love sometimes. However, Natasha Lunn has done a lot in this book to restore the pure meaning of what love is through the lens of hers and others’ experiences and made me reassess some habits and ways of thinking/doing.

Each section breaks down love into its different forms: between friends, lovers and family, how it can be achieved and sustained with the opening chapter about how we find love being the most profound for me.
With regards to interviews, it was Greg Wise’s tribute to his sister and speaking frankly about love and loss of siblings that really got me.

Non-fiction books in this form have the tendency to be preachy, impractical or even cheesy but this collection is the opposite and Lunn has done well to create something as informative and engaging as this - I subsequently signed up to the Conversations on Love newsletter! Defo recommend ♥️

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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