Love is Strange

In the kitchen Gillian loads the Hotpoint and frets about letting her baby go.

In the bathroom Clifford styles his hair like Cliff's and wishes for a television.

In the front room Arthur smokes a pipe and plots to fend off the loan sharks.

In her bedroom Annette lifts up her nightie and heads for Clifford's room.

In a tour-de-force of undressed taboo, four monologues intertwine to begin the story of an ordinary family in the fifties. How their seemingly contented, simple world bubbles under with odd desires and secret pangs - how it is shaken when they come to light - and how, step by step with the dawning sixties, life for all of them is whirled into a carousel of fashion, debauchery and explosive revelation.

“'A tragedy of embarrassment, where every detail is comic' Adam Mars-Jones, Observer.”

'An exciting and powerful novel' Beryl Bainbridge. Beryl Bainbridge
'A melodramatic morality tale, exposing the decay beneath the comfortable respectability of a family's life ... it sends nostalgic chintz down in gleeful, satanic flames' Melissa McClements, Financial Times. Financial Times
'A tragedy of embarrassment, where every detail is comic' Adam Mars-Jones, Observer. Observer

Joseph Connolly is the critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling writer of eleven novels, as well as eleven works of non-fiction. He lives in London.

On Clifford's wedding day, he is struck by a storm of memories of his childhood in the fifties. Doted upon by his mother, tyrannized by his father and misled by his sister, his domestic idyll is shattered by events that propel the ordinary family onto a path of turbulent change in step with sixties London. From family home to convent school to criminal underworld, the last frontier of forbidden love is bared in all its strangeness. Written with unrelenting passion and vivacious execution, Love is Strange is both an exceptional family saga and an ironic eulogy for a lost time.

In the kitchen Gillian loads the Hotpoint and frets about letting her baby go. In the bathroom Clifford styles his hair like Cliff's and wishes for a television. In the front room Arthur smokes a pipe and plots to fend off the loan sharks. In her bedroom Annette lifts up her nightie and heads for Clifford's room. In a tour-de-force of undressed taboo, four monologues intertwine to begin the story of an ordinary family in the fifties. How their seemingly contented, simple world bubbles under with odd desires and secret pangs - how it is shaken when they come to light - and how, step by step with the dawning sixties, life for all of them is whirled into a carousel of fashion, debauchery and explosive revelation.

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