Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen has been saved from oblivion.
Having survived a serious car accident on the eve of the second world war with her only-just-platonic friend Gershon at the wheel, Eileen begins writing him some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters as she reports on her convalescence. During the unfolding correspondence of some 14,000 letters over six years, liberated in tone from any self-conscious intention of future publication, the brilliant but tentative young English literature graduate seduces and hopes to secure for romantic perpetuity the man she already knows she loves ‘on the other side of idolatry’.
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