Ti Amo
‘I love you’ is one of the most conventional phrases, not open to customisation. But Hanne Ørstavik’s Ti Amo, whose narrator charts the two years following her partner’s diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, remakes these words, returning to them all their complexity, vitality and pain. In her agony, it is to writing that Ti Amo’s narrator turns, and Ti Amo shines with writing of beauty, delicacy and truth. Its sentences swoop and fly. Addressed to the narrator’s partner – ‘you’ – throughout, Ti Amo is an extraordinary book about the truth of all relationships. After reading it, the words ‘I love you’ feel different in the mouth.
Emma Fielding’s reading is drenched with a light that miraculously draws our attention to what lies beneath.
Cover: Simon Russell