Everything Love Is

This is a heartbreaking and life affirming story that asks and engages with the deepest notions of what love is. Claire King has captured the subtle and moving onset of dementia and what it means for Baptiste who is experiencing it and Amandine who loves him. Baptiste lives on the tethered barge that is Candice. He tethers his life to what he can handle - the finite notes of a piano, the bare minimum of possessions, his clients whom he counsels on how to be happy and his meals at a local inn. Baptiste begins to really live life and embrace love when he untethers Candice to go on journey where he learns to trust his love.

For a man who can help others find happiness, he mostly struggles to incorporate love. He has a new client who he is falling in love with but cannot quite connect with subconscious hints that there is something just out of reach. Books, photos and strangers are an unsettling experience. Loving Baptiste is a demanding and soul destroying ask. Despite all that stands between them, Baptiste and Amandine do secure a happiness enriching togetherness. It is the mark of the strength of character and the love between them that they can negotiate the troubled waters of the future for as long as possible. The condition of dementia creates the perfect milieu for a twist or two in the novel.

Claire King has stitched together an immersive, artistic and impressionistic picture of dementia. It is also a beautifully written exposition of what love can be when walls are crumbling all around. The descriptions and prose are poetic and idyllic. An idyll though that carries its own growing threats. The seasons feature largely in the book as a mirror of life changes. It does not give the nitty gritty travails of dementia on a daily basis but it does lift the spirits about what can otherwise be a deeply traumatising experience for sufferer, and for their family and friends. Many grateful thanks to Bloomsbury, the publishers for a copy of the book.

An emotional & heart-wrenching read. Claire King brings out the emotions of those enduring Dementia and how it affects those around them .... It is a tear-jerker but a book worth reading to know more about Dementia and how to help and understand those enduring this mind-crippling condition.

You feel for the characters and cry with them! You feel for Baptiste & Amandine. I was gutted, emotionally thrown off and felt weary even after completing the book.

A heartfelt book that needs to be read. It is so lovingly written. It is so emotional

This story is like a fairy tale, starting with a boy being born on a train. But fairy tales are not always exclusively about happiness, are they? A birth on a train and the mother dying is sad enough, but a new life beginning as well. The lady that was the midwife in the train will be the mother of this boy.

When he is forty years old we pick up the story about this boy - now man - Baptiste. How who he became who he is and the main characters in his life. The story is being told both by him (the fisher-king) and his Chouette (the owl).

Everything Love Is is an impressive story about love, about 'what happens when you let happiness slip out of your grasp and attach itself to something beyond your control, something so intoxicating that you ache to keep it although you know you cannot.'

The chapters are well balanced and parts are beautifully written.

You are so beautiful to me, can’t you see…So good. I powered through this book and I loved every beautiful detail. The writing is captivating to say the least and you do have to take it as it comes because it felt very different to me. I thought it explored love and what it is in an interesting and refreshing way. Simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting.

Let me say from the start that I am a fan of Claire King’s writing. I have enjoyed her short fiction immensely and I adored her debut novel ‘The Night Rainbow.’ But we all know about the difficult second novel so it was with some trepidation that I began reading All That Love Is. I am delighted to say that my worries were needless.
Ms King’s second novel is a book of such beauty and sadness. We start the story at the traumatic birth of the main character, Baptiste, on a train headed for Toulouse. What follows is a tale of a man haunted by his past who spends his life as a therapist trying to make his clients happy, yet failing to find happiness for himself. Baptiste lives on a canal boat, the Candice and has many friends along the towpath and in the local bar where he eats most nights. In particular, a young waitress, Sophie develops a relationship with Baptiste and draws him into interacting with the world in ways he isn’t comfortable with. Baptiste also becomes infatuated with one of his clients, a mysterious woman called Amandine who desires nothing more than love.
The story is told from two viewpoints, Baptiste’s and a nameless woman he refers to as Chouette. But who is Chouette and what is the reason for Baptiste’s decline and failing memory?
I adored this book. Ms King’s prose is poetic and beautiful. I could almost taste the stews Baptiste ate at Jordi’s and smell the wild garlic growing along the towpath. The characters are likable and the author quickly made me care for all of them. Highly recommended.
P.S. I have fibromyalgia and am going through a flare up and a bad day for fibro fog. I apologise for my lack of good words in this review. But please believe me, the book is good.

was asked to review this by Net Galley Such an emotional story which starts with a maternal death on a train in the late sixties, and a passenger claims the newborn as her own. This is a family drama spanning several generations in southern France. Set on a canal boat in France.

It is sad and thought provoking at the same time.

Beautifully written I just devoured this book