Cover of Four New Words for Love

Four New Words for Love

A charming, insightful and deeply moving portrait of an unlikely friendship between a well-to-do London widower and a young Glaswegian homeless woman that helps both overcome their tainted pasts and rediscover happiness.

Read more

Christopher is a decent, elderly, suburban Londoner learning to live again after his release from a loveless marriage following the death of his wife. By chance he meets Gina, a young homeless woman from Glasgow, on Waterloo Bridge. With new-found spontaneity, he offers her a room for the night, and there begins an unlikely platonic friendship between two people from opposite ends of the country, both geographically and socially.

Gina has left behind a life devoid of opportunity and a dark tragedy, and slowly, under Christopher's protection, she re-finds her confidence. But a causal remark shatters their fragile domestic idyll, forcing Christopher to leave London and travel to Glasgow's mean streets to find and be reconciled with his new friend.

Four New Words for Love is a beautifully crafted portrait of two damaged lives from different ends of the social spectrum who are both seeking release from the mistakes and thwarted potential of the past. Michael Cannon demonstrates a masterful restraint and boundless empathy in his development of two unforgettable characters attempting to change their lives.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 288 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Four New Words for Love? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Four New Words for Love. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. John Banvilles Narcissistic Fictions Shares welsh, scottish, European
  2. James Joyce and the Revolt of Love: Marriage, Adultery, Desire Shares welsh, scottish, European
  3. John McGahern and Modernism Shares welsh, scottish, European
  4. Arundhati Roy's the God of Small Things: A Routledge Guide Shares welsh, scottish, European

“If you want more of the same (literary fiction), start with these.”

  1. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
  2. The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne
  3. Shakespeare on love & lust
  4. Literary Geographies

“If it was the welsh that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Joyce's Ulysses: A Reader's Guide
  2. Imperialism, reform and the making of Englishness in Jane Eyre
  3. Dickens's Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'
  4. Myths of wilderness in contemporary narratives

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. The Hundred Story Home: A Journey of Homelessness, Hope and Healing
  2. Do You Believe?
  3. Second Summer
  4. Christmas Yves