The Republic of Love - Softcover

'A novel that's so engrossing it makes you want to retire to a squashy sofa until you reach the end. Vividly fresh! glittering and spangled with fabulous surprises.' Sunday Times 'Compulsive reading. What makes this a novel you can't resist? The answer is humanity.' Daily Mail 'Perfect fairy-tale material.' Daily Telegraph 'Shield's celebrates the persistence of love in a way that is affirmative without ever turning soppy. She is Mary Wesley's superior when it comes to writing aout sex in a robust, compassionate way, and creates characters who are endearing for all the strange little things we know about them. Hers is a colourful, funny, wise world on which it is hard to close the cover.' The Times 'Perfectly rendered, a touching, elegantly funny, luscious work of fiction!I read it with awe and delight. I envy those with The Republic of Love still ahead of them.' New York Times

""The Republic of Love" marries a wide diversity of elements, mythical and modern, ironic and moving, exhilarating and melancholy! A love-surveying story that is enticingly seductive." - "Times Literary Supplement." It is now a major motion picture directed by Deepa Mehta and starring Bruce Greenwood, Emilia Fox, Edward Fox, Lloyd Owen and Claire Bloom. ""The Republic of Love" is a hymn to the pleasures and pains, the raptures even of an unspectacular life. Fay discovers that happiness is "a kind of by-product of existence, and not an end in itself". This piece of knowledge saves her, Shields suggests, from the watery, ambiguous yearning of the mermaid, "plaintive, coy", wordlessly calling out to no one. A simple message, but Shields delivers it with so much grace and so little pretension, that it is impossible not to be enchanted by her voice. She sings with the charm of a true siren. In her hands, we believe, anything can happen." - "Guardian."