What a gorgeous read! A real celebration of love in it's many many forms, with two of my favourites- Dolly Alderton & Philippa Perry. Such an uplifting read- I've already gifted it several times!

4.5 rounded up to 5.
Reading Natasha Lunn's Conversations on Love was a rollercoaster of emotions. Don't pick this up if you want a fluffy book with cute tips on how to seduce your partner and the like. This book is much deeper than that.

Conversations on Love is a collection of interviews with famous people such as Candice Carty-William, Alain de Botton, Dolly Alderton, Lisa Taddeo, Roxane Gay, and many more. They discuss a range of topics, ranging from dating in your twenties; why we at times crave sex and other times we put it on the back burner; how friendships evolve over the years; motherhood; miscarriage; infidelity; grief following the death of a loved one, etc.

I read the first 200 pages quite quickly and was able to relate to soooo much. I wish this book existed 10 years ago, it would have saved me a lot of heartache! Yet again, I probably wouldn't be where I am today without those painful experiences and mistakes...

My favourite section was "How to Sustain Love" which made me reflect on who and what we take for granted and the little moments and quirks we will remember once that person is gone from our life.

I also enjoyed the reminder that we constantly change, so do people around us. So if you don't talk to friends or family for a long time, it's OK to tell them "this is who I am now." "Actually, I don't do/like this anymore".

One of my favourite extracts is from the interview with Lemn Sissay, author of My Name is Why:

"Creativity is not the monopoly of artists. You could find it in your shopping habits or in how you design your front room or how you style your hair. I wish more people understood that, because then they could fully embrace its power and access that sense of self and love that I get when I’ve created something that matters."

The only thing which prevented me from giving it a 5 stars was that some of the "recap" paragraphs after each interview felt repetitive and written in a 'self-help' kind of way which took me out of the book a bit. I also found the last third of the book harder to read ("How can we survive losing love?") But I am sure I will go back to it later in life and will find it even more relevant and compelling then.

In a nutshell, this is a must read to help you appreciate people around you, or people who you have lost touch with or your loved ones who have passed away... 💔

Thank you @Netgalley @penguinukbooks and @natashachloelunn for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I will buy a copy for my mum!

Another extract I loved, from the interview with Sarah Hepola:
"As humans we have a default setting that’s cranky and lazy and self-interested and slothful. The people I see that live good, meaningful lives have rigorous exercises to push back against that setting, whether through prayer, meditation, gratitude journals or running. We ’re creatures of wanting, but also of consciousness. So the way that we can push back on longing is to pay attention to what we have. I can see the fact I live in a house alone as a prison sentence. Or, like this morning, I can wake up and spend time with my beautiful cat and feel so grateful to be alive in the world." 🐈‍⬛

Besides the obvious, I didn't know what to expect when I read Natasha Lunn's Conversations on Love. I hadn’t read her columns before and I think I was expecting a love story of sorts. In a way I got that. Natasha Lunn hasn't tried to trick you. This book really is a book about love with conversations with many people from other writers, to artists, to therapists. It is how love - such a universal feeling - feels different for everybody and that there is no one true way to define it.

What you do get is a broad understanding of how people feel on a daily basis, whether it be the love to a partner, parent or child, Lunn has explored it. Parallel to her conversations is the story of Lunn and the miscarriage that she and her partner suffered. In this aspect, kudos has to be given to Lunn as she has bled her feelings on the page with such purity that her pain feels visceral.
If you are looking for a book that will make you be introspective on the feelings and practicalities of love then Conversations on Love is the book for you.

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn is available now.

For more information regarding Penguin (@PenguinUKBooks) please visit www.penguin.co.uk.

Very interesting book with viewpoints on what love actually means. Trying to explain the concept of love is quite difficult but the author manages to convey the meaning of love very succinctly and in a very readable manner..

Definitely not my kind of book.

The author makes a good job at tackling a tough subject. Saying something different, original and meaningful about love is not an easy task. Yet the book is informative and interesting.

There is a lot of details and clearly the author made the most out of the enormous amount of material available. This included interviews and personal experiences. I particularly liked the personal stories - but maybe that's because I am more of a fiction reader.

What I did not particularly like? No big deal, but I found some aspects a bit disconnected from the rest of the body. For example, some psychologist would be quoted in support of a point when actually they were making another point entirely.

Overall, an ok book.

What a beautiful book - both inside and out! I absolutely loved this, and wanted it to keep going after finishing. I found the conversations on grief particularly striking (Greg Wise was a favourite) and I liked the style of intertwining personal memoir and interviews. I think it will be even better in a print copy.

It's the sort of book I instantly want to recommend and pass to all of my girlfriends.

5 stars.

Loved this book - some brilliant individuals featured and although some tricky topics covered it was really relatable and accessible. I read some of it before my wedding for some speech inspiration and there were some lovely quotes.

I envy the author of this book! Assembling a collection like this with some amazing people. Dolly Alderton, and Candice Carty-Williams, for a start. Ghosts and Queenie are two of my favourite books ever so it was lovely to see them included here. Philippa Perry - another hero of mine. Susie Orbach. Alain de Botton....I could go on. I kept turning the page (well, as much as you can turn a page on a Kindle!) and thinking, "What?!!! She managed to get them as well?!!!"
My ONLY complaint about this book was that it came out five years too late for me! This time five years ago, I was still single (aged 46) and wondering where I was going wrong. I wish this book had been around then!

At this point I'll read anything that has Roxane Gay's name on it - I love everything she does and her essay in Conversations On Love was no exception.

Even though her essay is the reason I initially requested this book I loved all of them, for different reasons.
Each and every one feels so intimate and beautiful, it was a joy to read.

I can't give this anything but 5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

An enjoyable and useful collection of emotional experiences, interviews and thoughts on love. It explores what it means to us and how it manifests in our lives. The writing is eloquent, engaging and transparent. The author shares her experiences and her motivations for writing the book. The interviews are intrinsically interesting and thought-provoking. Some experiences and ideas will resonate, but all are fascinating.

This book is a riveting read and also something to revisit at different times in your life.

I received a copy of this book from Penguin UK via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Intimate, candid and beautifully-textured conversations about love, in all its forms, as well as longing, desire, loneliness and loss. Natasha Lunn shares her personal story about longing and searching for love, and as her story unfolds around the revelations from her 'guests', it comes together in a deeply moving, relatable and comforting volume. People often wonder what books make a good gift for a friend - this book would be top of my list. I thought of at least 5 people I know who would get a lot of comfort, reassurance, insight and pleasure from reading it, as I did. Highly recommended!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

I was drawn to this book by the list of contributors - so many wonderful people who are known for their thoughtful observations and interesting insights. This isn’t just a book about romantic love. It covers so many different ‘types’ of love and how these experiences can shape our lives. Some of the writings touched me more than others, and I did feel like this was a book I needed to pick up and put down rather than read from cover to cover.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for my ARC

Thank you to @netgalley @vikingbooksuk for my arc of this lovely little gem of a book. I started reading this last week and it is full of nuggets of beauty all about love ❤️

Synopsis: After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?

Review: This book covers all types of love and Lunn invites authors, actors and notable people to speak about their experience of love. This may be love after loss, sibling love in the last stages of life, long term married love, friendships and the tests of those friendships. The people she interviews share a wide range of experiences and I highlighted so many beautiful quotations that really spoke to me specifically, either Kelly in the past or now. Lunn details the loss of babies and how her own personal experience led to problems in her own love life, mainly with her friends. She takes her interviews and learns from them herself which I loved. The reader feels like we're all in a journey of discovery together... What is this love you speak of? What does it really mean to us? How do you keep love going? Are friends just for a season of your life?

Loved the thoughts and conversations on all types of love in this book. Natasha Lunn tackles all aspects of love and she gives the reader her personal thoughts on her life and what she has experienced about love. She also includes the thoughts of a lot of other people giving different perspectives on love that they have experienced which makes for a very fascinating read.

It is not just romantic love that is discussed there are thoughts on family, friends and how the loss of love can also effect people. It is a very varied read and certainly makes you think about love as a concept and how it makes the reader feel..

A great read for anyone who wants to think more deeply about their relationships.

This book gives a very intimate and genuine view on the way humans experience love and attraction, with conversations from people who have been married for 30 years, to people who reject romance, preferring to stick to platonic friendships.

Conversations On Love also discusses emotional topics such as loss, whether that be the loss of a parent or a child, or loss of a way of life.

Being a rather cynical person on the topic of romance, I was unsure going into this book, but I’m glad I read it - it provides new perspectives with every chapter because of the wide variety of interviews.

This is a book I can see being the perfect gift, and something so many people would enjoy.

As someone who swings wildly between being a hopeless romantic and a massively cynical single person, I wasn’t expecting this book to resonate with me as much as it did. But the overwhelming message was that there are many different types of love, and romantic love isn’t necessarily the most important. There were anecdotes, explanations, and opinions that made me stop, think, and consider my own idea of - and approach to - love. Far from the sap-fest that I was concerned it would be, the majority of the contributors’ advice was that love is hard, and not very often romantic or idyllic. I was stopping so often to highlight parts and sentences that spoke to me, and I have already recommended to friends.

This has been a highly anticipated read for a lot of my fellow bloggers and I was delighted to be accepted for it. With such a general title, I didn’t really know what to expect but I knew it would make me think and perhaps even teach me something about the broad spectrum of what love is.

Part memoir, part series of interviews, Conversations On Love is Natasha Lunn’s deep dive into love in all its beautiful, messy forms. Input comes from Candice Carty-Williams, Greg Wise, Philippa Perry, Lisa Taddeo, Dolly Alderton, Roxane Gay, Juno Dawson, Alain de Botton, Diana Evans and more.

The book’s introduction explores Natasha Lunn’s own obsession with constantly longing for something more from her life. It really sets the tone for the whole book as it’s suggested that this longing for what we don’t have is perhaps responsible for all of our dissatisfaction. It is the cause of why we sometimes abandon what we have in search of something else or why we are simply never completely happy.

It also explores where our insatiable desire for romantic love comes from. The innate fear and prejudice that comes with being single is something that many people, particularly women, are desperate to avoid. Of course, this can often lead to unhealthy relationships and intense unhappiness all in the name of not being alone or ‘without love’. The following interviews all talk about the many other forms of love and endeavour to show both Natasha and the reader that not having a romantic relationship does not make you either alone or loveless.

Several sections of the book, particularly Candice Carty-Williams’ interview on the wonders of female friendship and Dolly Alderton’s comments on how friendships change over time, made me really consider why platonic love is considered less significant than romance. If you’re lucky enough to have a set of friends who have seen you through some life-changing or formative years, there is no doubt that this is an incredibly special form of love. The book does a lot to demonstrate how all other types of love can lead to a deeper happiness than the wrong romance ever could.

There are some poignant passages and really beautiful words of wisdom all over the book. These are lessons that we all need to learn and draw from when our relationships and lives get hard. Anyone thinking of ending a relationship should certainly read these parts and think about what how it applies to their own situation. I have no doubt it will give those readers the strength and confidence to make the right decision.

The conversation with Emily Nagoski, a writer and expert on sex and sexuality, made this striking but highly accurate comparison between wanting spontaneity in a sexual relationship to the demands of capitalism. It’s true that capitalism runs on selling satisfaction, which of course requires people to be permanently dissatisfied. Is it possible that this society-produced habit runs over into all aspects of our lives? It’s a fascinating connection and to me, it makes perfect sense!

Author Diana Evans talks about the love she has for her children and how that changes as they grow up. She also talks about how our relationship with her husband inevitably changed when the children arrived. Of course, it’s no secret that the introduction of children into a relationship makes for monumental change but Diana explains that it’s a beautiful one. Seeing your partner as a parent throws a new, gorgeous glow on them and although, your shared life is different, you can fall even deeper in love.

Poorna Bell’s interview focuses on the importance of her relationship with her sister. Poorna’s sister has been her confidante through the most horrific life events and her interview really caused me to think about the power of sibling love. The above quote really resonated with me and of course, I couldn’t help but think of my own relationship with my brother. We have always had a unique bond and I know that there may come a time where he is the only one left who has known my entire life.

There are also many sections that mention how important it is to know who you really are and what you really want before entering into a significant romantic relationship. Losing your sense of self is common when entering a new relationship because you’re trying to be a certain version of what you think your new partner wants. True self-awareness is something that I only achieved through months of therapy but I know it has made me much clearer on what I want from my relationships. The truth is that a shiny, new relationship will never be the answer to deep-rooted self-esteem problems and it takes a lot of people years to realise this, if they ever do.

I loved the philosophical parts of the book too. Some of the people that Natasha interviews go off on little tangents where they talk about how strange and complex humans are. Poet Lemn Sissay has a thought that I’ve had myself many times. The fact that everyone in the world has their own thoughts, dreams, fears and problems that we will likely never know about it and yet we’re all united in so many of these very same things is fascinating.

The final part of the book talks a lot about the concept of loss and what grief really is. When you love someone, the idea of losing them is always terrifying but it’s something that we will all have to endure multiple times throughout our lives. The conversations with actor Greg Wise, who cared for his sister Clare in her final months of a battle with cancer and with Lucy Kalanithi, the widow of When Breath Becomes Air author Paul, are heartbreaking but they’re also full of hope. In these interviews, I could see that their loved ones were very much still with them in everything that they did and that’s an extremely comforting, beautiful idea.

Conversations On Love is about the importance of making and maintaining connections of all kinds. We will never get all of our needs met by one person and we need to be willing to meet some of those needs ourselves. Friends, family, colleagues, work, passions and faith are all valid sources of love that will evolve over time and because of this, we need to be willing to work at our relationships. Natasha Lunn is a fantastic interviewer and this is a wonderful collection of deeply personal stories, sage advice and stunning writing that will make you think and take your breath away on the same page.

I think when I went to read this book I had a different understanding in my head about what it would actually be. The conversation aspect is fully covered as the author speaks to many different people about love. But for me I felt it left me feeling a little left out, as the conversations always ended with the same question, ‘What did you wish you knew about love?’ Now for someone who is still single, I felt I was reading people’s experience in finding love and living with it, without being able to relate to them.
So for this reason, it didn’t hit the right notes for me.

In Conversations on Love, author Natasha Lunn seeks to understand relationships and love, how we find love and how we sustain it over time. Through interviews with authors, therapists and her own experiences, discussing romantic relationships, friendships, sibling relationships and relationships to parents.

The interviews are short, but you still get a look into the feelings and experiences of the people interviewed. It also made me want to read more from certain authors which was fun. I like how the book doesn’t overly romanticise love and looks at loss and difficult aspects of love, making it really realistic. It covers miscarriage, death, transition, vulnerability, motherhood and so much more. The book really resonated with me and makes you realise you need to appreciate people more and savour the small things with them.

I really enjoyed the writing. Lunn makes it seem conversational and easy to read, unlike some other non-fiction books. I would read more from Natasha Lunn and I may give this a reread in the future (which says a lot as I don’t normally reread). I really recommend everyone give this a read.

‘Conversations on Love ❤️’ by Natasha Lunn
🌟🌟🌟🌟 4/5
.
After years of feeling that love was always out of reach, journalist Natasha Lunn set out to understand how relationships work and evolve over a lifetime. She turned to authors and experts to learn about their experiences, as well as drawing on her own, asking: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?
.
💫 What would I say to my younger self? Keep your feet well planted. You know it’s not just about who you find, it’s also who you’re going to be. Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It’s the ability to take responsibility of one’s own behaviour. Responsibility is freedom 💫
.
This was a different type of read for me, not only in terms of genre but also writing style. The book is laid out as ‘conversations’ with lots of different people and they discuss the different types of connections you have with people (ie. lovers, friendships, children), how you can find love, how we can experience it, how it affects people differently and more importantly, how we can sustain it.

The book wasn’t just conversations between these people, but also descriptions of the authors own experiences and reflections of her life. It was a very emotional and honest read and I’m truly grateful that @natashachloelunn shares this with us. It’s one that I will forever recommend as I feel everyone will be able to relate to it in some aspect.
.
Thanks to @netgalley, @penguinukbooks and @natashachloelunn for the advanced copy! Publication date 15th July 2021 📖