A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

The extraordinary story of an unconventional marriage. A mesmerizing meditation on love and loss

Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic socialist from a very different background to Alison’s working-class family. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead.

In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael’s cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London’s old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael’s mother. A Radical Romance is a luminous and deeply intelligent memoir of love and grief.