---

What’s it about?

I can only say a little, or I’ll spoil the story for you.

Eulogy for Love tells a love story, and quickens towards the end into a thriller. It covers two decades, from 1994 until 2014, and is set mostly in the cultural context of the English middle classes.

One person binds the story together. This is Kat.  In 2000, she’s a bright and likeable young woman from a working class background, and content in her lesbian identity. Her gap year after finishing school has been spent with a wealthy and academic American couple, travelling to Florence and Boston. She’s returned to England with a sophistication beyond her years. Now, she only has to mark time until she can take up her place at university. But fate will take her life elsewhere.

Yes, but what’s it really about?

I spent my working life writing papers that aimed to set out the arguments, make the case. ‘Left brain’ writing, if you like. I knew (partly from some failed attempts) that I couldn’t write a novel in that mode. So I chose a few initial plot elements, and left the characters to come alive. 

In retrospect, there are of course themes in Eulogy for Love.  Most obviously, it’s about love, and the loss of those we love; and I don’t mean only romantic love. Other themes include the way we compromise in our journey through life, and the priorities that permit no compromise.  The novel also expresses my disappointment, often to the point of disgust, with men and male culture. Even though I am a heterosexual male, I have since childhood felt distanced from my male peers. Perhaps that’s why I’ve written a novel that attracts the label of women’s fiction. (I’d be pleased if men read it, though I doubt they will.)  Extending that theme, the novel suggests that, thanks to a variety of cultural influences and the lazy, selfish inclinations of men, most heterosexual couples never discover the full joys of making love.

There is another theme, and it’s expressed in the opening pages. There have, of course, been many wonderful novels set in exotic places – past, present, and future. But sometimes the preference of so many writers to turn to other places and other times – particularly, fashionably, dystopian futures – seems to imply that ordinary folks, living in present times, have no stories worth telling. I don’t believe that’s true. As the saying goes, “Every stranger you meet is fighting battles you know nothing about”. I’d like to add my small voice to the work of those writers who choose to tell the stories of these ‘ordinary’ people, and the battles they face.