Julia Grampion, 28 years old, has just been awarded her doctorate at London University. But things are not going well with her: her affair with Paul is broken off because of religious complications. She drifts into another affair, learning a different and more changeable idiom of love, learning also how language disguises the shifting uncertainties of human relationships.

The Languages of Love has a London background–London as a cosmopolitan city, as an academic and literary centre. Its scenes are university departments, the Reading Room of the British Museum, espresso bars and little restaurants in Soho, the Serpentine Lido, the London Docks, publisher’ parties and “a room of one’s own” in Bloomsbury. Also present are a varied group of characters: professors, students, philologists and mediaevalists, and highbrow journalists.

Bernard, Julia’s lover after the break with Paul, is sensual, cultured, selfish, with a learned French wife, Nicolette. Paul himself, charming and devoted, is unable or unwilling to transgress the laws of his church. The African student Hussein, simple, passionate, intelligent and much given to the quotation of Sanuri proverbs, which reveal a less complicated world than that of Bloomsbury. The language of his love for the exquisite Georgina is like a refreshing oasis in the dusty desert of London’s life, and his gift to her of a camel foal is a comic interlude never to be forgotten, in a first novel of wit and intelligence marking an out-of-the-ordinary talent.