Winter Love

In her long and well-traveled life, Han Suyin, the physician daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, wrote mostly about Asia, but in 1955 she published this very British gem of a novel, telling, with exquisite precision, the story of a love affair between two medical students in wartime London. Mara, already married, is glamorous amid the drab rationing; Bettina, known as "Red," the narrator, is "mousy" by her own description, but driven and attractive in her own way. The writing is breathtaking in its exactness and in its sudden revelations of beauty and doom, in an affair brutally corralled not only by the social enforcement of who could love each other, but by one character's inability to love at all. —Tom
[My enjoyment of the audiobook—available from our partners at Libro.fm—was heightened by the equally precise narration by Lucy Scholes, who, wonderfully, is also the editor at McNally Editions who has done so much to bring neglected women writers back into print.]