The Art of Preserving Love
Fiction · Harlequin · Writing as Ada Langton
The Art of Preserving Love is no typical romance. From a small country town to the tragic backdrop of the first World War, this is a story of many types of love; love that surmounts all odds.
The gossips call Edie Cottingham the ‘Too Girl’ – too stubborn, too outspoken and too modern to get a husband. But Edie has her sights set on Theo Hooley – the quiet church organist and veteran of the African Boer War. But just as Edie’s plan comes to fruition everything upends.
But Theo Hooley is a man who is patient and every Sunday he walks from his home to woo Edie, rose in hand. Each week Edie refuses him. Slowly the town begins to fall under the spell of the romance. Women sigh, men mutter, the local children form a procession that follows Theo; as the whole community becomes caught up in his display of devotion until unexpected evens change all their lives.
“The Art Of Preserving Love is no typical romance. More concerned with waiting and learning the lessons of patience than it is with passion, this novel is a maze of intriguing teasers strung out with the mad sort of logic abiding desire brings”-Newtown Review of Books
Whimsical, intelligent and blossoming everywhere with all kinds of emotional honesty, The Art of Preserving Love is by far the loveliest and most inventive contribution to Australian-flavoured romantic fiction this reader has read in quite some time.
Langton manages to preserve a lovely aura of romance, and writes truly about enduring love through characters that are meaningful and authentic. You might shed the odd tear along the way. Gasp occasionally. But you’ll also smile a lot, cheer people on and have a great time being wrapped up in the lives of all concerned.
From Robbi
This story came to me with the simple poem at the beginning of the book: Half an inch, half an inch, half an inch shorter. The skirts are the same for the mother and daughter…..
I wanted to create a heroin who was willing to break the rules in her quest for love. So from this poem off I went. I set it in 1905 when women had a lot of rules and restrictions.
I start writing with a beginning and if I’m lucky (which often I’m not) an end I want to get to. But I have no idea how I’m going to get from one point to the other – it’s a journey but at the end of this book I wanted the heroine Edie to find strength she didn’t know she had within her, a truer acceptance of who she was and of course to find true love.
But essentially, more than anything, this is a story about all kinds of love, a mothers love as she grows fat eating for her skinny son, love between sisters that causes one of them to give up everything, love that can endure a war, love that causes a father to rock the town when he creates a special house for a sickly child, love between two women and love that makes a man take a weekly journey with the towns children joining in.
I wanted to write a saga that had romance, betrayal, death, love well everything a book should have really – a book I would want to read.
