There is a particular kind of loneliness that is almost impossible to explain to people who have not lived it: the loneliness that arrives not when you have lost all your friends, but when the friends you built your life around start living theirs. One friend moves to a different city for a promotion. Another gets pregnant and relocates to the suburbs. A third goes back to the ex everybody else hated. The group chat goes quiet, and you are left standing in your flat wondering what to do with all that empty time. That is where Love by the Book by Jessica George begins. And it is a much more specific, more honest starting point than most contemporary women’s fiction is willing to stake.
Two Women, One Bookshop, No Instruction Manual
Remy Baidoo is a debut novelist in her early thirties. Her book, These Four Friends, was loosely based on her closest friendships and became a bestseller. Now those same friends have dispersed, her literary agent wants a second manuscript she cannot write, and she is back in her childhood bedroom eating ice cream out of the tub at three in the afternoon. Remy is not a mess, exactly. She is just someone whose whole infrastructure has quietly collapsed, and she has not found the language to tell anybody.
Simone Beduah teaches Year One at a London primary school and supplements her salary through sex work. Elegant, self-sufficient, and so thoroughly defended against connection that she has made a science of not needing anyone, Simone has been estranged from her family for months. She gets her books from the same independent shop every Sunday at noon, eats dinner at the same Turkish restaurant where the waiters have stopped asking if she is expecting anyone, and tells herself this is contentment rather than what it actually is.
These two women collide in a bookshop. Wine is spilled. A jumper changes hands. Simone turns down Remy’s offer of dinner with an honesty so blunt it stops Remy mid-sentence. And yet, somehow, they end up in each other’s orbit anyway.
What the Book Is Actually Doing
Love by the Book by Jessica George wears its thesis gently but clearly: the great love story of a person’s life is not always a romantic one. George structures the novel around a central friendship rather than a central romance, and she builds that friendship with the same careful attention usually reserved for will-they-won’t-they pairings. Every scene between Remy and Simone has texture. Their trust accumulates the way real trust does: slowly, unevenly, and with several retreats.
The narrative structure is part of the book’s personality. Remy’s chapters are written in first person, fast and funny and full of asides, because Remy is exactly that kind of person. Simone’s chapters are third person, more controlled, more guarded, which is exactly what Simone is. George also weaves in group chat transcripts, emails from Remy’s literary agent, and fragments from the novel Remy is writing about her own life. That last element quietly raises the book’s most interesting question: what do we owe the people whose stories we borrow?
The Things This Novel Gets Right
The craft here is steadier than its charming, conversational tone might initially suggest.
- Simone’s characterisation is the book’s greatest achievement. She is not designed to be softened by the plot. She is guarded for reasons she has earned, and when she finally lets someone in, it reads as a decision rather than a transformation. That distinction matters.
- The humour is sharp without being unkind. The book lands its jokes in the middle of genuinely difficult moments without undercutting them. Remy’s interior voice is compulsively readable, and Ada, her theatrical, palm-reading mother, steals every scene she enters.
- George’s London feels lived-in. Specific restaurants, specific parks, the particular texture of being a Black British woman navigating her late twenties between family expectations and the life she is actually building. The cultural specificity of both women’s Ghanaian heritage is present without being parenthetical.
- The friendship earns its emotional payoff. George does not rush the relationship. There are small moments of care quietly scattered across the second half of the book: a sandwich chosen based on a detail remembered from months earlier, a car journey where something true is said by accident, the way two people learn to occupy silence together.
Where Things Get Complicated
Love by the Book by Jessica George lands at four stars rather than five, and here is why.
The pregnancy subplot, which arrives mid-novel, is set up with enough weight that readers reasonably expect it to carry more narrative consequence than it ultimately does. Its resolution feels compressed against the space given to its setup, and some readers will feel that thread deserved a fuller examination.
There is also the matter of Remy’s original friend group. Nova, Lin, and Mel are vivid in Remy’s memory and in the way Remy describes them, but they remain relatively thin on the page as actual characters. The grief Remy carries for what she has lost feels real; the people she has lost feel slightly underdeveloped. This is particularly apparent when you compare how textured Simone is in comparison.
The middle section, as Remy attempts to manufacture connection through pottery classes and author events, captures loneliness accurately but occasionally paces itself into a lull before the plot moves again. The loneliness rings true. The rhythm sometimes wobbles.
These are not fatal criticisms. They are the kinds of things that become visible once you have finished the book and started thinking about why something very good did not quite reach great.
About the Author
Love by the Book by Jessica George is her second novel. Her debut, Maame, was a New York Times bestseller following Maddie Wright, a young Ghanaian-British woman navigating grief, family obligation, and her own late-blooming sense of self in London. George has a recognisable sensibility across both books: emotionally generous, culturally specific, willing to let her protagonists be both funny and genuinely struggling. Readers who come to this novel first should know that Maame is equally worth reading.
Who This Book Is For
This novel is for readers who find the standard romance narrative insufficient. It is for anyone who has looked around a room and realised that the person they most need to call does not fit neatly into any category the world has prepared for them. And it rewards patience, because George is building something, and the building is the point.
It is also, quietly, one of the more honest pieces of writing about adult loneliness published in recent years.
If You Liked This, Read These
- Maame by Jessica George: Her debut novel, same warmth and cultural specificity, different emotional territory
- Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams: A Black British woman in London finding her way through friendship, identity, and the mess of being human
- Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman: Isolation giving way to unexpected connection, with the same reluctant heroine energy as Simone
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney: Fiction where friendship carries all the weight usually reserved for romance
- Such a Fun Age by Kiese Laymon: No, wait. Such a Fun Age by… actually, for sharp, warm writing about the politics of female friendship and race, try Anxious People by Fredrik Backman for unlikely connections, or Yellowface by R.F. Kuang for the ethics of using other people’s lives as creative material
Love by the Book by Jessica George is the kind of novel you read and find yourself pressing into someone’s hands without quite being able to explain why. It is about friendship, yes. But more than that, it is about what it costs to need someone, and what it gives you when you stop pretending you do not.
