In the wake of the Great Blackout, faced with the near-extinction of humanity, a pair of lovers speak to each other. They parse, with precision, with familiarity, the endless aspects of their love. Out of their dialogues, piece by piece, a composite image of love takes form, one that moves outwards beyond the realm of relationships and into metaphysics, geology, linguistics, AI.
Years previously, a writer and her husband, a Latin professor, stay in Venice while she works on a text. As they roam the city, strange occurrences accumulate, signalling that the world around them is heading towards a point of no return.
Blending fiction and essay, poetry and philosophy, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves is a startling, expansive work of imaginative agility, one that renders love unfamiliar so as to renew it, and makes the case for hope in the midst of a disintegrating present.
‘There are certain writers whose work you turn to knowing you’ll find extraordinary things there. Borges is one of them, Bolaño another. Agustín Fernández Mallo has become one, too.’
— Chris Power, author of A Lonely Man
‘A protean taxonomy of love whose shape veers between three modes, that of commonplace book, gendered dialogue and metafiction. Agustín Fernández Mallo finds not one but many envelopes to contain the cosmos.’
— Jesse Ball, author of Autoportrait
‘In his Book of All Loves, Fernández Mallo offers us an encyclopaedia of loves, each one sounding – as if for the first time – as a pure tone, from an infinite spectrum of tones. Here is a book unlike any other, a book that recreates and regenerates love, even as it asks us whether it is strong enough to hold.’
— Amy Arnold, author of Lori & Joe
Signed bookplate enclosed.
