Award-winning, Independent Bookshop in South Dublin
The Company of Books is an award-winning, independent bookshop in Ranelagh, Dublin 6. We stock an extensive range of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books which are available in the shop and on our site.
Love In Exile
We ache for love, but love eludes us.
Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human. Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both.
Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture. Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one.
Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.
In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.
Awards




About The Company Of Books
The Company of Books opened at 96 Ranelagh Village in November 2009 and has been gathering good reviews and loyal customers since. Country Finalist for Independent Bookshop of the Year 2021 (Booksellers Association) and Dublin Winner of An Post Bookshop of the Year.
We have an eclectic mix of fiction, non-fiction and children’s books offering something for everyone. Spot a review of a book you’d like to read? Contact us and if we don’t have it, we’ll order it for you.
We also sell book vouchers and a range of beautiful cards and stationery.
