Something sensational to read in the train

Any memoir is a form of double-entry book-keeping, in which what has been lost is reckoned against what has been gained. It’s always easier to fill in the ‘lost’ column, since boasting is discouraged; sadness gets more attention, too, as it’s generally supposed to be more interesting than contentment.

Sophie Ratcliffe includes an actual list of her losses in this wonderful and highly individual book. The items include an Australian opal her uncle gave her, a purse snatched from her at St Petersburg railway station, her father, and the exact memory of a lover’s face. ‘Not that your face was much to write home about,’ she adds. ‘Not that I could write home about it in any case. Happily married women don’t write home about other men’s faces.’ No. Perhaps what they might do instead is write a book, recording that face in plain sight.

I began The Lost Properties of Love on the 7.48 train from Pershore to London and finished it on the 13.02 from Paddington to Totnes. There could be no more suitable way to read it because this is, among other things, a meditation on train travel, both real and imagined. Indeed, Paddington features here, as the scene of the ending of an impossible affair. Many of the chapters take their titles from railway stations. While herself rattling along the tracks from the north back to her home in Oxford, England unspooling through the windows, Ratcliffe considers love affairs, marriage, books and endings. As she says: ‘A train journey is inherently nostalgic.’

She has two fellow travellers, one fictional, one historical: Anna Karenina and a 19th-century American journalist called Kate Field. I haven’t so relished an account of reading Tolstoy since Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books, in 2010.