‘Illuminating, beautiful . . . This is a special book, full of little epiphanies’ Natasha Lunn, author of Conversations on Love. The Examined Life, the bestselling debut from psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, was about learning how to live; his new book, Love’s Labour, is about learning how to love. When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?

In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can’t post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can’t decide whether to get divorced; the friendship group that explodes when an adulterous affair begins; and the man whose partner’s death is almost too much to bear. As an analyst, Grosz’s unerring ability is to locate what ails the heartsick. As a writer, he elegantly shows how we can deploy the agonies of love as tools for understanding. The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another.

‘You will be better at love after you read this book’ Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon.

Praise for The Examined Life: ‘Grosz’s vignettes are so brilliantly put together that they read like pieces of bare, illuminating fiction. . . . It is this combination of tenacious detective work, remarkable compassion and sheer, unending curiosity for the oddities of the human heart that makes these stories utterly captivating’ Sunday Times. ‘Writing with sympathy and insight, Grosz distils years of work into a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks’ New York Times. ‘I was enthralled . . . profound and moving, large ideas packed into a slim volume’ Observer.