The Passionate Friends

Wells turns from science fiction to human drama in this searching novel of a love that endures across a lifetime despite marriage, duty, and social convention. Told as a father’s confession to his son, it traces a passionate but impossible relationship and the compromises demanded by respectable society. Frank about desire and critical of the constraints placed on love, it reflects Wells’s lifelong interest in reforming the rules that govern private life. Thoughtful and emotionally honest, The Passionate Friends is a moving study of longing, freedom, and the cost of the choices we are forced to make.