Most novels about love know their terms. A romantic arc has a grammar everyone recognizes: the meeting, the misunderstanding, the resolution. What Love by the Book by Jessica George proposes, quietly and with real conviction, is that platonic love deserves the same attention, the same page count, the same ceremonial weight. It is not the first novel to make this argument, but it is one of the more persuasive recent attempts, and its sincerity is what sets it apart from books that make a similar claim and then hedge their bets with a romantic subplot.
George’s second novel follows Remy Baidoo and Simone Beduah, two women in their late twenties living in North London who are, in very different ways, completely alone. Remy is a debut author with a bestselling first book and no idea what to write next. Her three best friends have dispersed: one to New York for a promotion, one to Hertfordshire for a baby and a garden, one back to an ex-boyfriend who has always been the wrong choice. The group chat has gone quiet. The flat feels large. Simone, meanwhile, is a primary school teacher with a secret second career and a family she no longer speaks to after an incident that unravels across the novel in careful fragments. She lives beautifully and alone, and has organized her life so that she cannot afford to need anyone.
They collide at a literary event. A glass of red wine lands on Remy’s white shirt. A jumper is offered. A dinner invitation is extended and, in the novel’s most interesting early scene, declined. Not warmly, not with a reason. Just: no. It is the kind of honest refusal adults rarely risk.
Dual Voices, Deliberate Distance
George’s formal choice here is worth noting. Remy is told in first person, present tense: immediate, funny, prone to long interior riffs about food and the social calculus of introversion. Her chapters read the way good diary entries feel, specific and slightly embarrassing and full of things you recognize in yourself without wanting to. Simone is given the third person, a remove that mirrors precisely her relationship to her own life. She watches herself from a step back. She has built walls so load-bearing they have become structural.
This contrast is well-handled for most of the novel. The reader knows Simone’s secret long before Remy does, which creates a dual tension: watching a friendship form on one side of the page while knowing what one of its participants is protecting on the other. It is a smart construction. The complication is that the concealment eventually outstays its welcome. The friendship deepens, the pages accumulate, and Simone’s secret remains held at arm’s length from Remy in a way that begins to feel, past a certain point, less like characterization and more like plot management.
That said, Simone remains the novel’s most arresting creation. Her precision, her careful rituals, the small tenderness she extends to her Year One students while denying it to herself: these details accumulate into something genuinely felt.
What the Book Gets Exactly Right
There is a specific kind of comedy Love by the Book by Jessica George does very well. It is not the broad warmth of the genre at its most predictable; it is dryer and more observed, the humor of someone paying very close attention to how people actually behave. Some particular pleasures:
- The group chat excerpts, which serve as comic punctuation and as actual grief. Watching the “FUTURE MILFS GROUP CHAT” go gradually, achingly quiet is more affecting than it has any right to be.
- Remy’s mother, a theatre-adjacent woman who wears two different earrings because she could not choose one and dispenses the wisest possible advice in the most theatrical possible register.
- The bookshop owner Clyde, whose relationship with Simone is rendered in nearly wordless shorthand, and who is the first person to suggest that she let someone in.
- The meta-fictional thread running through Remy’s chapters, where the second novel she is failing to write gradually becomes the novel you are reading. It is a risky device, but George handles it with enough lightness that it works.
The London setting is specific without being touristic. Restaurants are named, neighborhoods feel inhabited, the daily texture of the city moves through the book the way weather does.
Where the Novel Strains
At roughly 4 stars, Love by the Book by Jessica George earns its goodwill but not a clean sweep. The novel is slow to gather itself. Readers who arrive expecting the friendship to be the engine from early on will spend a fair amount of time in the individual orbits of each woman before the two lives properly intersect. This is defensible as structure; it is occasionally frustrating as an experience.
The parallel arcs are also not equally weighted. Remy’s storyline is warmer, funnier, and more accessible, which means it receives more light. Simone’s sections, while more formally interesting, can feel slightly compressed against the richness of what her interior life deserves.
If You Loved This, Try These
- Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman: a solitary woman, an unexpected friendship, secrets wearing the shape of a life
- Maame by Jessica George: her debut, for readers who want more of her voice and her London
- The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary: warm, London-set, about the unexpected intimacy of proximity
- Talking at Night by Claire Daverley: friendship across time, told with similar emotional precision
- Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid: two women orbiting each other’s blind spots
- Happy Place by Emily Henry: the sustained argument that friendship is the love story
The Case It Makes
By its final pages, Love by the Book by Jessica George has earned what it set out to do. The friendship at its center is not tidy. It arrives late, proceeds slowly, and carries the weight of everything both women have not told each other. But it is witnessed, which is, George seems to suggest, what love actually requires. Not grand gestures or perfect timing. Just the willingness to remain in the room after the difficult part.
For a novel arguing that platonic love is serious and worth writing about, that is a satisfying ending. Not because it resolves everything, but because it insists the connection was real. That is more than most love stories bother to do.