UNEXPECTED LESSONS IN LOVE, by Bernardine Bishop. John Murray, 2013, 378 pp., ￡16.99 (hardcover)
This is a vibrant and even welcoming novel, though it's substantially concerned with last things. Only the title lets it down, being a sort of kaftan, something designed to fit everyone that suits no one. The section titles "Gut Feeling" and "Shit Scared" strike an entirely different note, and perhaps it's just that the publisher has lost nerve. The important thing is that the writer hasn't.
Cecilia is in her 60s, a cancer survivor living with a colostomy and an unhealed wound where the cancer was, where the radiotherapy did its drastic work. As one disconcerting sentence puts it, "She could not help wondering what had happened to her vagina." Even so, she hasn't altogether ruled out the resumption of a sex life. Advertisers talk about the USP, the Unique Selling Point. This is a book with four powerful anti-SPs — mortality, disfigurement, "female troubles" and sex in later life. All the more impressive that it offers such a rich range of pleasures.
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