On Love — Alain De Botton

Before How Proust Can Change Your Life, before The Art of Travel, there was On Love, the utterly charming debut that introduced Alain de Botton to readers everywhere. Now he revisits the internationally best-selling novel in a new edition of this classic book. Still packed with profound observations and hilarious diagrams, On Love examines for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love. Plotting the course of an affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia -- defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness -- and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away.