![The Behaviour of Love](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
![The Behaviour of Love](/assets/artwork/1x1-42817eea7ade52607a760cbee00d1495.gif)
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The Behaviour of Love
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
From 2016 Man Booker longlisted Virginia Reeves comes a moving and riveting new novel about the head doctor of a mental institution whose marriage and job come under threat when he and a younger patient develop a relationship.
Doctor Ed Malinowski believes he has realized most of his dreams. A passionate, ambitious behavioural psychologist, he is now the superintendent of a mental institution and finally turning the previously crumbling hospital around. He also has a home he can be proud of, and a fiercely independent, artistic wife Laura, whom he hopes will soon be pregnant.
But into this perfect vision of his life comes Penelope, a beautiful, young epileptic who should never have been placed in his institution and whose only chance at getting out is Ed. She is intelligent, charming and slowly falling in love with her charismatic, compassionate doctor. As their relationship grows more complicated and Laura stubbornly starts working at his hospital, Ed must weigh his professional responsibilities against his personal ones and find a way to save both his job and his family.
A love triangle set in one of the most chaotic, combustible settings imaginable, The Behaviour of Love is an incredibly compulsive, poignant exploration of marriage, lust, and ambition from one of America's great young literary talents.
‘Reeves’s theme – as in her debut – is the limits of forgiveness. She’s a superb writer, moving with crisp, swift strokes over the thorny question of how far people ever change’ Daily Mail
Praise for Work Like Any Other:
‘A striking debut about love and redemption, the heavy burdens of family and guilt and learning how to escape them. Powerfully told and lyrically written, there is not a false note in this book. Reeves is a major new talent’ Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
‘Work Like Any Other is an exceptional novel told in clear, direct, and starkly beautiful language. Virginia Reeves has a gift for bringing to life all the tensions that emerge wherever people, place, and progress collide. I absolutely loved it’ Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
‘Assured and absorbing… a potent mix of icy honesty and heart-wrenching tenderness’ Jim Crace
‘Beautifully written, this is an unusual and moving debut’ Sunday Times
‘A slow-burning pleasure. Brutal, beautiful, and to some significant extent, redemptive’ Daily Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reeves (Work Like Any Other) forms an intense love triangle between a doctor, his wife, and one of his patients across the 1970s and '80s in her introspective latest. Psychologist Ed Malinowski recently moved to Montana to oversee the Boulder River School and Hospital, a chronically underfunded and understaffed mental institution. In order to quell his wife Laura's fears about his long sessions with, and not entirely professional praise for, his 16-year-old epileptic patient Penelope, Ed encourages Laura to come to the institution to teach art once a week. The plan backfires and Laura grows more weary of Ed's denials. In an effort to save his marriage, Ed releases Penelope to her parents as a shining example of his sweeping deinstitutionalization plans that are criticized by state officials and family members of the institutionalized. Soon, Laura is pregnant, but Ed misses the early birth of their son when he rushes to visit Penelope in the hospital after she abruptly stops her seizure medications. Things quickly fall apart for the characters an unmoored Ed drifts through a period of womanizing and heavy drinking, until a medical crisis brings all three together in unexpected, difficult ways. Readers who enjoy complex depictions of the lingering commitments of relationships will be swept away by Reeves's crisp, powerful novel.