Loveless

"This book won The Bookseller’s YA Book Prize in 2021. It is incredibly powerful. What I really enjoyed about this book was that it is all about asexuality and exploring a different kind of sexuality that we don’t hear about as much, we don’t often read about and we may not know anybody that is openly asexual or aromantic. This book introduced me to a different way of thinking and a different way of feeling about the world. It’s about a girl called Georgia who is just about to start university. She’s never had a relationship and she’s never had any sexual or romantic feelings, never had a crush on anybody before. She gets to university and thinks she’s going to find love and it’s going to be great. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What happens is that she finds love in different ways. She finds it through friendship, she finds it in the wrong ways by trying to start a relationship with her male friend, which is happening for all the wrong reasons but she’s exploring that. I think that’s quite an authentic way of looking at it, as an example that must happen quite a lot for an asexual or aromantic person. She learns more by joining the LGBT society at university, she learns more words, she learns about different people, more options and ways that can describe her. So it’s all about promoting awareness, but I think to young readers and parents of young readers, and adult readers as well, it’s a beautiful story. It’s one of those books that I still feel like I’m in it, I can still imagine those characters, like I could walk past Georgia on the street. It feels very real, very visceral, very emotional. I think it’s brilliant. Yes, and both Birthday and this one are really good examples of Own Voices stories."