Meetup One Hundred and Thirty Nine: Winter Love

Hey team - I promise this will be the last winter focused novel for the season, we've all had enough of cold and snow. Instead of zooming around an apocalyptic ice Earth, we are in wartime London in 1944. This is where we read about the intense, but doomed, love affair of Red, a student at Horsham Science College, and her married classmate Mara. Published in 1962, this novella by the Asian-British author Han Suyin, contrasts the austerity and siege-like mentality of WWII London with the passion, heightened emotions, and heartbreak of an illicit romance.

Probably best known for her novel, A Many-Splendored Thing, this is one of Han Suyin's more overlooked works but has been recently published through McNally Editions. At 160 pages it's pretty slim so won't be too difficult to read.