School for Love [Paperback]

Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding time until he can secure passage to England. Adrift and deeply lonely, Felix has no choice but to room in a boardinghouse run by Miss Bohun, a relative he has never met. Miss Bohun is a holy terror, a cheerless miser who proclaims the ideals of a fundamentalist group known as the Ever-Readies—joy, charity, and love—even as she makes life a misery for her boarders. Then Mrs. Ellis, a fascinating young widow, moves into the house and disrupts its dreary routine for good.
Olivia Manning’s great subject is the lives of ordinary people caught up in history. Here, as in her panoramic depiction of World War II,The Balkan Trilogy, she offers a rich and psychologically nuanced story of life on the precipice, and she tells it with equal parts compassion, skepticism, and humor."This portrait of Middle Eastern politics is especially timely; highly recommended." --Library Journal

"How, in just a few pages, does a writer earn our trust, and her characters our allegiance? Olivia Manning's work has been out of sight for decades, but her newly reissuedSchool for Loveis about to charm and startle a whole new generation of readers." --O, The Oprah Magazine

"Olivia Manning was an outstanding novelist." --The Times(London)

"A triumph of portraiture, compassionate, witty and assured”–Time and Tide

"There is something good in almost everything Olivia Manning wrote" –The Spectator

“Olivia manning has taken her place in the first rank of English novelists.” –Los Angeles Times

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