Love's Work

A masterwork

4Columns

Brilliant

Giles Fraser

Powerful and unsentimental

New Left Review

Into Love's Work Rose concentrated the essence of her life and thought. It dwells on sickness and mortality, on friendship and betrayal, on the most intimately personal and the most sublimely universal

The Times

Magnetic - elegant, unflinching, irreverent, and ferociously principled in its discussion of desire and affliction

Merve Emre, New Yorker

Rich, satisfying, desirable ... I struggle to think of a finer, more rewarding short autobiography than this

Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

This is not a pastel reverie, but a work in which the author, an English philosopher, feminist, and Marxist, not only bares her soul but carefully dissects it...Rose develops by contrast her notion of love's work: the obligation to go on thinking and caring in spite of the certainty of physical and moral defeat. Gillian Rose died shortly after completing this rigorous and lyrical book

Boston Review

Powerful...a miracle

New York Times

This small book contains multitudes...It provokes, inspires, and illuminates more profoundly than many a bulky volume, and it delivers what its title promises, a new allegory about love

Marina Warner, London Review of Books

The philosopher's laconic, lyrical memoir displays an unsettling yet wholly inspirational vigour in the face of life-threatening disease

Lindesay Irvine, Guardian

Sears the page it occupies

Philadelphia Inquirer

This beautiful memoir comes right from a genuinely thoughtful heart. It is good to find that philosophizing can offer its age-old consolations so present tensely

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In its emphasis on the work of living, suffering, and loving, this is a masterpiece of the autobiographer's art, intense and rationally decorous at the same time

Edward Said

Extraordinarily beautiful

Olivia Laing

An autobiographical narrative of astonishing power which intertwines threads of philosophy and personal life

Times Higher Education

Remarkable ... Memory, confession, abstract ideas and Rose's candid accounts of her failure in love feature in a work which is both haunting and utterly matter of fact

Irish Times

Magnificent...Makes whatever else has been written on the deepest issues of human life by the philosophers of our time seem intolerably abstract and even frivolous

Arthur Danto

Exquisite

Prospect

A poetic and highly intellectual memoir that encourages us to read the mare's nest of grotesqueries that is our world of pain, illness, and trauma as a birthing-ground for the complex beauty of human relationships

Kirkus Reviews

Part intellectual coming-of-age tale and part spiritual memoir, Rose's search for the soul takes her on a wildly dizzying ride through despair and hope, sickness and healing, love and death

Library Journal

There are few philosophical works as momentous and yet as personal as this one

Catherine Pickstock

A gem, filled with such lightly captured truths that sparkle with an elegance and clarity all the more striking for how hard-won they must have been. Grace and grief, wonder and agony, love and lovelessness are woven into an intricate motive of contradictions, a variation in motion, receding into the unbearably personal, before expanding again to what connects us all. I also found it brave and honest that it helped renew my faith in those rare virtues. I hope many find their way to it

Hisham Matar