No flowers, no chocolates, but all the right words. This is what we talk about when we talk about love – on the Vintage podcast. This month Alex Clark and Will Rycroft talk to Anna Jean Hughes from digital publisher The Pigeonhole about the many different types of love and which books played an important role in shaping their perception of love and lust. Louis de Bernières comes in to talk about his latest collection of poetry and how love has influenced both that and his current fiction. And finally, in an extraordinary interview about her late husband Paul, Lucy Kalanithi talks about his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, which has been sweeping up everyone who reads it. A profound and uplifting book about how to live a good life gives us a chance to talk about a very special kind of love. https://thepigeonhole.com/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1099471/of-love-and-desire/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/1109814/when-breath-becomes-air/

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/vintagebooks

Sign up to our bookish newsletter to hear all about our new releases, see exclusive extracts and win prizes: po.st/vintagenewsletter

Paul Kalanithi – When Breath Becomes Air

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.

When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away?

Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all.When Breath Becomes Airis a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.