Should She Choose Her Father S Legacy Or Listen To Her Heart? Zarri Bano Is The Glamorous Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Daughter Of A Wealthy Muslim Landowner, Habib Khan. She Falls In Love With Sikander, A Business Tycoon And Plans To Marry Him, But Her Father Takes An Instant, Irrational Dislike To Sikander And Vetoes The Match. When His Only Son Is Killed In A Freak Riding Accident, Habib Khan Decides To Make Zarri Bano His Heiress, Resurrecting An Ancient Tradition Which Decrees That An Heiress Must Remain Celibate. Zarri Bano Is Thus Forced Into Marriage To The Holy Koran And Becomes Her Clan S Holy Woman . But Will Zarri Bano S Heart Allow Her To Ignore Her Love For Sikander? And Can Sikander Live Without Her? Set In Contemporary Pakistan, London And Egypt, Fated To Love Is A Romantic Story Of Love And Betrayal, With All The Pressures And Conflicts That Modern Life And Old Traditions Bring. A Lean, Lyrical Meditation On Tradition And Independence, Sensuality And Sacrifice The Times A Very Moving Tale Of Love, Passion And Islamic Traditions . . .Difficult To Put Down Bbc National Asian Network A Dramatic Story Of Family Intrigue, Religious Passions And Riproaring Romance Michèle Roberts

What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."

"Rosenbaum offers a spirited and enjoyable defense of his version of love." —The Wall Street Journal A stirring manifesto on love in the modern age, now available for the first time in paperback: . . . In a work of ambition and brio, legendary journalist Ron Rosenbaum tackles his hardest topic yet: everyone's favorite four-letter word. He begins by investigating the neuroscience of love, arguing that our understanding of love is imperiled by quantification and algorithms, which distill our behavior into mathematical formulas, our personality into brain-chemical categories, and our curiosity into quiz questions. The very capacity that makes us human, Rosenbaum posits, is being taken over by numbers. To save it, he turns to literature and pop culture, discussing writing about love from a vast range of sources, including Tolstoy novellas, trailblazing Updike manuscripts, David Foster Wallace and Chrissie Hynde. Part of love’s essence is its mystery, says Rosenbaum, and when he eventually finds his own answer to the riddle of love — a happy ending! — it turns up in a completely unexpected place. In Defense of Love is more than an examination of the intersection of love with literature and science. It is a celebration of the uncanny and the persistent, the sublime and the ridiculous: the inexorable power of love.

Originally published in 1936, this is a study of Love's Labour's Lost by the English historian Frances Yates (1899-1981).