Remy Baidoo knows how to turn friendship into a good story. She did it with her debut novel, building a bestselling book from the lives of the three women closest to her. Now she has a second book to write and nothing to say. Her friends are growing apart, their lives are changing, and the easy intimacy that once gave her material has disappeared. Then she meets Simone.

Jessica George’s Love by the Book begins with a writer losing both her subject and her social world, before introducing her to a woman who will become the unlikely centre of both. Simone Beduah is a kindergarten teacher with a complicated secret: she works as an escort, a fact her Ghanaian family discovers with devastating consequences. Remy, meanwhile, is trying to make sense of her own shrinking friendship circle as one friend moves to New York, another becomes pregnant, and another disappears into a troubled relationship.

Their friendship isn’t instantaneous. It grows through repeated encounters, conversations and the strange process of allowing someone new into a life that has already been rearranged by loss. For George, that process becomes a way of examining friendships with the same seriousness usually reserved for romantic relationships. She has spoken about the difficulty of making friends in adulthood and the ways friendships change as people enter new stages of their lives, including marriage and parenthood.

But Remy and Simone’s relationship comes with another complication: Remy is a writer. As she becomes closer to Simone, she begins turning their friendship into material for her next novel. The impulse is familiar to anyone who has ever written from life, but George pushes it into uncomfortable territory. At what point does paying attention to someone become taking from them? And can a friendship survive when one person has made the other part of a story?

The questions sit alongside the novel’s exploration of family, sex work, motherhood, loneliness and the expectations placed on women. Born and raised in London by Ghanaian parents, George brings those questions into a story where family can be both refuge and source of rupture, and where friendship becomes something worth protecting in its own right.

With Love by the Book, George isn’t simply making the case that friendship is another form of love. She gives it the complications of one: the intimacy, the obligations, the misunderstandings and, eventually, the possibility of betrayal.

Here’s the synopsis:

Remy’s three best friends have always been the centre of her life, until their lives begin moving in different directions. One heads to New York, another becomes pregnant, and another becomes absorbed in her relationship. At the same time, Remy is struggling to write the follow-up to her bestselling debut.

Simone, meanwhile, believes she has everything she needs in her family. But after they discover her secret work as an escort, they cut her off, leaving her more isolated than she has ever been. When Simone and Remy meet in a bookshop, they are hardly instant friends. Yet as their paths continue to cross, the two women begin to discover that they may be exactly what the other needs.

Love by the Book is a novel about friendship, family, betrayal, motherhood, and the different forms love can take.

 

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