All About Sarah is a novel about a love affair in Paris, between a single mother with a young daughter and Sarah, a musician who lives life loudly and certainly. The unnamed protagonist seems to be drifting through her job as a teacher and looking after her daughter, but then she meets Sarah at a party, and everything changes. She finds herself happy and excited, but the intensity of their relationship and the obsession and violence that will spark from it, mean this is not an uncomplicated love affair, and she finds herself unable to think of anything but Sarah.

Translated from French and written in very short chapters, this is an easy novel to read in one or two sittings, with a sense of travelling through the relationship via the protagonist's emotions and key memories. The style of the narrative draws you into the book, but the narrative itself does feel a bit lacking, a not particularly original story of an intense relationship between two women with elements of obsession and abuse under the surface. All About Sarah is told well, but feels like a predictable story of how a woman who has never been in a same sex relationship before falls in obsessive love with another woman.

Thanks to Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
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'All About Sarah' is like nothing you have read before. This is not a novel that easily lends itself to the rather prosaic format of a book review. So, forgive my own inadequate words that will never adequately do justice to this hauntingly beautiful and luminous love story between women. It is a love story with a difference. By this I do not refer to the theme of same sex relations - rather the conceptualisation of love as a complex, ambiguous emotion, far removed from the saccharine simplicity of a conventional love story. Told in short chapters - less a narrative and more a sample of emotions experienced by Sarah and her lover during the course of their relationship - the power of the format of this short novel threatens to overwhelm the reader. Indeed, it is all about Sarah. Bohemian, unconventional, passionate and devoid of social graces, Sarah. For Sarah's lover, a young teacher who remains nameless - a clue if any was need that all-consuming love involves subsuming one's identity in another - nothing exists apart from Sarah. Even her young daughter is simply referred to as 'the child'. Love is reconfigured to encompass a gamut of emotions - separate yet inseparable from that certain undefinable something that we subjectively call love. This a novella of Shakespearean proportions. In snippets of the monologue, the stream of consciousness of Sarah's lover, we read about a profound love that can be obsessive, destructive, violent and utterly tragic. From the raw love scenes to the brief eruptions of violence between the two women, the experience of this novel is visceral - creeping, creeping, creeping into every sinew, until the boundaries of the individual body is permeated by feelings transformed by words. Delabroy-Allard's prose it at once poetic and often hard-edged. It is raw, beautiful, transformative and ultimately revealing. We hate ourselves for the dark, mystifyingly transformative power of love. It makes us weak, vulnerable - but would any of us do without it? That is the question.

Mesmerising and compelling - if you only read one book of literary fiction this year, let it be 'All About Sarah'.

Out of all books in the world, French novels about love written in short chapters are undoubtedly my favourite. When read in one sitting, they gave you all the usual emotions of a relationship, sometimes the ones you wish you could have, many times ones that you rather just read about. The love in All About Sarah belongs to the second category.

It is an enjoyable novel about a relationship between a young school teacher and a slightly older violinist. The book describes their relationship across all its stages, from the unforgettable first meeting, snippets of details only people in love pay attention to, and the eventual end. It is a very fictional relationship, that would hardly work in real life, but is enjoyable to read about. As it would be considered problematic on many levels, it should be taken with a bit of perspective.

I had mixed emotions about the characters. Yes, they were irresponsible and extremely self-centred, but not into a point where I would be annoyed by them. Surprisingly, the thing that drove me mad many times was rather the use of the word "snatch" that I will never stop connecting with this book from now on.

Overall, the fact that I have finished this book in one sitting that rarely happens proves that I enjoyed reading it a lot. It had all the elements that a book I adore should have and I would not hesitate to read other works from this author. I would recommend this novel to all people who like reading French novels that leave them feeling like they have just got out of an unhealthy, yet unforgettable relationship. In the best sense possible.