The book lovers: A sequence of love-scenes, chosen and arranged by Leon Garfield (First edition)

Leon Garfield, one of the world's best-known and most imaginative writers for young people, has turned his skill and inventiveness to the arrangement of an outstanding collection of love scenes taken from famous novels by writers of many different nationalities, from Dostoievsky to Jane Austen. Around these scenes, which range from the absurd to the tender, the tragic to the hilarious, Leon Garfield has woven the story of a young man who, having fallen in love with a pretty librarian is too shy to express himself coherently and turns to passages from the classics in an attempt to make her understand his feelings. She answers him in the same way, but they both find that it is all too easy to misinterpret the written word. All ends happily, however, with a little help from interested onlookers. Leon Garfield's brilliant narrative and the passages from Trollope, Turgunev, Stendhal, Thomas Mann and other classic writers, combine to provide not only the perfect introduction to the nineteenth century novelists, but an engrossingly readable story in its own right.