Following the success of her debut bestseller The Transgender Issue, Shon Faye returns with a powerful memoir of her lessons in love in all its forms. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, Love in Exile is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in all of its politicised forms, as the meaning of life itself.

Shon Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her quiet obsession with the feeling that love was not for her. As she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. Love in Exile posits love’s boundaries as something far broader than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.