Valentine’s-ish Literary Romance: Lucas Oakley on Nearly Departed, Boys Book Club & love stories that stay with you long after reading

Join Kate and Lucas Oakeley for this Valentine's-ish episode of The Book Club Review, recorded at Housmans Bookshop in King's Cross. We're exploring literary fiction where love takes centre stage, but the reward is complexity rather than a guaranteed happy ending.

Nearly Departed manages to combine the enjoyable tropes of Rom Com with the thoughtful exploration through writing that we associate with literary fiction. We explore how Lucas’s real-life experiences—witnessing a fatal cycling accident and his father's first wife dying young—shaped the book's exploration of love, loss, and second chances, and the art of balancing humour with heartbreak while playing with rom-com tropes.

Of course, we’ve got plenty of recommendations for love stories with emotional depth, including Lily King's Writers & Lovers, Andrew Kaufman's All My Friends Are Superheroes, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, David Nicholls' Sweet Sorrow, Douglas Stuart's John of John, and hot-book-of-the-moment Wuthering Heights.

We’re also discussing Boys Book Club, the organization Lucas has co-founded to encourage men to read and talk about books. What makes a great book club pick for an all-male book club? We’re going to be finding out.

We’ve even got Valentine's recipe – rigatoni with a long-simmered ‘Sunday sauce’ – and a couple of cocktail ideas.

All in all, the perfect ingredients for a literary Valentine’s weekend.

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Booklist

You can find all the titles mentioned in this episode in the Book Club Review bookshop on bookshop.org

Nearly Departed by Lucas Oakeley

Heart The Lover by Lily King

All My Friends are Superheroes by Andrew Kaufman

Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Comfort MOB: Food that Makes You Feel Good

Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser

All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life Out of Order by Audrey Niffenegger

Links

Follow Lucas on Instagram and Tik Tok @lucasoakeley, and you can find out all the details for the Boy’s Book Club at theboysbookclub.co.uk

Housmans bookshop, the longest continuous-running radical bookshop in Britain, established in 1945 and based in London’s Kings Cross since 1959

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