A beautiful, strange and powerful book that's almost impossible to characterise. Part memoir, part meditation, part literary exploration, Ratcliffe has written a truly unique book that touches on love, loss, grief and memory in a fascinating way. A must read.

The Lost Properties of Love is a beautiful book that is part fiction and part memoir. Each chapter takes place during a different train journey and it’s a stunning look at life and love.

The book is set out in chapters that are headed with a train journey’s departure and end point and a date. It roughly follows a chapter of the author’s reminisces about her own life followed by a chapter about Trollope and his muse, Kate Field, or of thoughts on the fictional Anna Karenina.

You soon get a sense that Sophie Ratcliffe is exploring the pivotal moments in her life that have made her who she is. The loss of her father when she was just a young teenager, the affair she had with an older married man a few years later are the main events and she ruminates on these from different angles, and from different stages in her life. She compares her emotions to how Anna Karenina might have felt, and she considers the affair Trollope possibly had with his muse Kate Field and how she may have felt.

There are different textures of loss. The lost hope we find again, and the lost that we think is gone for ever. The loss of an object in the silt of mud, the loss of a smell or sound. People are lost to us, or make themselves lost.

The author’s thoughts on the loss of her beloved father were what I most identified with. The loss of a parent changes you in ways you can’t imagine until you’ve experienced it. The quote below, for all its simplicity, took all the air out of my lungs for a few moments because this is exactly how it is. You have belongings and people and one day you may well lose them, and they may well be lost forever.

The thing about having stuff, like handbags, or mementos, or fathers, is that you might lose them.

The book also explores our relationship to objects, and to the way we all lead our lives. The protagonist in this book struggles to organise the mess in her home, and at one stage ruminates that the mess is now condensed in her handbag. I could really identify with this. I finally got on top of all of my mess last year but I still feel the pull to gather stuff around me when I’m feeling down. Sophie Ratcliffe’s description of Anna Karenina’s red handbag and the things inside it brought a lump to my throat.

There are some gorgeous references to books in this book too, which I adored and so identified with. Also The Lost Properties of Love has really made me want to re-read Anna Karenina very soon, and it’s always good to be reminded of a book that you loved many years ago and have yet to revisit.

There’s a reason one of the greatest novels in English begins with it heroine’s delight that there was no possibility of taking a walk that day. There’s a reason Jane Eyre appeals to teenagers. There are no window seats on family walks. You cannot read a book while walking with your family.

This whole book is a meander through a life, in the way a train journey meanders through landscapes; it’s a gorgeous way to reflect on life. The time on a train gives us a chance to ponder and to think and this book is such a wonderful reading experience; it also made me think about events in my own life and to ponder them from different angles.

The Lost Properties of Love is such a beautiful book, and one that has been lingering in my mind ever since I finished reading it. I already feel that it’s a book I want to re-read, that it’s a book that will reward me for re-reading it and I don’t often get that feeling about a book. I recommend this one!

I think that the problem with books like this is that, whether or not a reader likes them is ultimately decided by how much they take a shine to their author. And unfortunately, I really didn’t gel with Sophie Ratcliffe.
I’m sorry! Don’t hate me. I am sure she is lovely, but there is something about her in the words of this novel that, despite the bloody amazing writing and the oodles of wondrous literary criticism, makes me not like her. And honestly, I think that’s because of how she treated her husband and children.
Within a few pages of reading, it is immediately clear why she chose Anna Karenina to focus much of this book on - the Russian classic that charts the most iconic affair in the history of literature - because, throughout Lost Properties of Love, Sophie Ratcliffe juxtaposes the novel with her own memories of an affair she once had with a much older man, whilst the two of them were both already in relationships.
Which is, you know, all well and good (you do you and all that), but by concentrating all of her thoughts and attentions on this single figure and experience in her life, it makes all of the rest of it seem hollow. The man is dying, the affair was decades ago, she has led so much life since then and yet, her "current life" does not even warrant more than a passing mention.
Maybe this was Sophie Ratcliffe’s intention: to make everything feel cold except for this man, and if it was, congratulations to her, but I do not know how I feel about that.
Love is love, and love is wonderful, but does one single experience of it mean that she has never loved any other person, not even her husband? That her love for this other man eclipses it? If so, then why on earth did she marry him?
Honestly I wish I knew, if only for the simple fact that I think I would have really liked liking this book.

This book is a quick enjoyable read. It is part memoir. There are reflections and stories all packed together.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

A incredibly moving memoir - tracing the days and months following her father's death (when she was in her early teens) - and the derailing of a life as a result of bereavement. But also a compelling weaving of fictional lives and classic novels. The book is framed around train journeys. I loved the scenes of travel across different countries and over time. I read this in just two days and will reread. Would recommend to anyone who has lost someone close to them. Thanks to HarperCollins for this advance reading copy.

This book is a wonderfully strange hodge podge of material. At bottom it's about love and about loss and what we do when those people we love leave us too early. It's a meditation on Anna Karenina and Tolstoy and trains. It's about memory and how it can bind us and free us. It's about navigating the hum drum every dayness of life and fitting into it the huge, aching rawness of loss and love. It's funny and sad and thoughtful and there were lots of little jewel like moments where I found myself sitting up and paying closer attention because I found myself right there on the page. I loved it.

I started to read this book and at first I was finding it difficult with the way it bounced around. I have to admit that I did have to leave it for a while. I returned to it but still found it a strange mix, part story telling, part memoir.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Harper Collins uk for my eARC of this book in exchange for my honest unbiased review

An unusual mix of memoir and literary criticism. With a focus on journeys, grief, families, motherhood, narratives.

Very unique book that felt so personal as it is part memoir. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend

A literary novel a mix of memoir a mix of story telling.A train ride a memory of affairs life experiences add in Anna Karenina so unique so interesting so well written a wonderful novel an adventurous read.Highly recommend,