Half In Love

Half in Love (2005)
Maile Meloy – John Murray
ISBN: 0719567718
Condition: Used (like everyone’s heart, really)
Vendor: Crappy Old Books

This is a book about people who are almost happy, nearly brave, and sort of in love – so, basically, all of us on an average Tuesday.

Half in Love is Maile Meloy’s quietly devastating collection of short stories about ordinary lives parked at awkward angles: marriages with hairline fractures, loyalties under stress, and emotions that can’t quite work out whether they’re coming or going. Nobody here is bursting into epic declarations. Instead, you get the truth: small decisions, wrong turns, tiny betrayals, and the moments you realise you’ve built an entire life on a feeling you never fully committed to.

Inside these elegantly piercing stories you’ll find:

• People who are half in love, half out the door, and completely unsure which direction they’re actually moving.

• Husbands, wives, exes, siblings, children and strangers orbiting one another, saying almost what they mean and then changing the subject.

• Quiet dramas in kitchens, back gardens, motels and cars – places where you’d usually just put the kettle on and hope for the best.

• The sort of emotional detail that makes you go “oh” in a small, horrified way because you recognise it.

• Writing so precise and calm that you don’t notice she’s taken your heart apart until you’re sitting there, blinking, on the last page.

Meloy doesn’t do melodrama; she does “this is exactly how people behave, unfortunately”. The result is fiction that looks soft and harmless and then hangs around your head for days, rearranging the furniture.

Our copy is graded Used, which, in the painfully honest idiom of Crappy Old Books, means:

• The cover shows light scuffs, tiny rubs or a faint crease or two – cosmetic evidence that at least one reader carried it around while pretending not to be emotionally compromised in public.

• The spine is gently creased, proof that somebody actually read the stories rather than leaving the book artfully posed next to a candle and never opening it. Still solid, still holding everything together better than some of the relationships inside.

• The pages are all present, clean and firmly bound, perhaps with a touch of age-toning and the odd minutely dog-eared corner where a previous reader quietly needed to stop and breathe.

• No tragic coffee deluges, no mysterious stains, no pages missing right when someone is about to make their worst decision.

Not pristine, not “as new” – but then neither is anyone in these stories, and that’s sort of the point.

Perfect for:

• Readers who love short stories that feel like eavesdropping on real lives.

• Fans of Alice Munro, William Trevor, and other quiet assassins of the heart.

• People who enjoy that strange mix of “this hurts a bit” and “please, can I have another one.”

• Anyone who has ever been not quite in love, not quite out, and entirely unable to explain what they’re doing.

Half in Love is a beautifully sharp collection about the spaces between wanting and doing, staying and leaving, saying and shutting up.

Available now from Crappy Old Books, where our feelings are complicated, our grading is simple, and our “Used” condition just means someone else has already survived reading it before you.

Keep browsing: See more Romance books Other books by Maile Meloy