How far would you go for love?

It’s 1863. The daughter of the most famous writer in the world, Victor Hugo, suddenly leaves her family’s home in pursuit of a young British soldier. She will chase him for eight years, following him across the world to the Caribbean, only to face his rejection and eventually end her days in a mental institution.

Adèle Hugo’s tragic story of hopeless love has inspired writers, composers, and filmmakers, yet her life has remained shrouded in mystery. Now Mark Bostridge sets out to find the truth about her and the soldier she loved, following in Adèle’s footsteps – and in so doing finds many aspects of her life that parallel his own.

An invigorating mix of biography, memoir and travelogue, In Pursuit of Love is a moving book about the pain of loving too much and of being loved too little; about the ways in which we are haunted by the dead; and about how other people’s stories can possess us and invade our own lives.