"The Myth of Romantic Love, a novel by Olivia Eielson, asks the question, 'Is true love a myth or is it real?' The protagonist, Louise Borgstrum, has devoted her life to becoming a painter and does not want to subordinate this ambition to a relationship - and then she falls madly in love. This story takes place in the 1970s, a time when many myths were being called into question. Until then, it had been an accepted fact that a woman's life was a failure if she wasn't married by the time she was twenty-four. It was thought a woman's life was less important than a man's. In the 1970s, the idea that a woman's life could, in fact, be equal in value to a man's, was just being tested out. The 1970s insisted, however, that love could be free.

This compelling and beautifully rendered love story poses a magnifying glass over a relationship - from its first passionate encounter to its harrowing, though finally transcendent, ending, and it makes us ask how far the world has come."

• Sherril Jaffe, Professor Emerita, Creative Writing and Literature, Sonoma State University, CA, and prize-winning author of Scars Make Your Body More Interesting, The Unexamined Wife, and other works of fiction

"Can a great passionate relationship be sustained in the modern Western world, and in particular in free-wheeling Berkeley, post the sexual revolution, post 1970s feminism? Olivia Eielson asks this question in The Myth of Romantic Love and demands of us readers to ask this same question in her sexy, honest, gutsy, passionate and eventually tragic novel of the complexity of modern love. Her protagonists Louise and Philip participate in 'elaborate dances . . . of independence and closeness, moving apart and coming together' until tragedy finally ensues. Does ecstatic romantic love inevitably lead to suffering? You'll have to read this fine novel and judge for yourself."

• Judy Wells, author of Night at the Musee d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities