Letters to the End of Love by Yvette Walker

JUDGES' COMMENTS

An assured and original debut, Letters to the End of Love is an exquisite meditation on the nature of grief and romantic love. In epistolary form, the book introduces us to three couples – an exiled Russian painter and his novelist wife writing to each other from within the same house in Cork in 1969; a young bookseller writing from Perth to her estranged girlfriend in 2011; and a retired English doctor writing from Bournemouth, 1948, back to his past and the love of his life, a German artist he lived with decades before.

A work of impressive maturity and authority, Letters to the End of Love is a deceptively risk-taking novel. A pure and unashamed exploration of love – achieved without a shred of sentimentality – it is a delicately constructed work of many layers, deftly traversing time spans, cultures and histories in its quiet contemplations on the making of art and of love, the grief and degradation of war and illness, and the profound human capacity for courage in the face of death. It is deeply moving, expansively imagined and beautifully written.