Iryanne: A Love that Never Was, a Love that Never Ends.

I opened Iryanne with a raised eyebrow. Black-and-white photographs, song lyrics, poems, quotations from books and films, legends, mythology, even scientific theories. A literary hodgepodge, I thought.

Then I began to lose myself in the story. I emerged the following day, dazed, with a lump in my throat.

The most beautiful love story since Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. The same sense of inevitability, the same enchantment. And the author shared so many of my own literary passions and interests.

The protagonists are Antonio and Iryanne. He is a teacher, though we never quite learn what subject he teaches. Thirty years her senior, handsome, a womaniser, a pleasure-seeker, divorced. A ladies’ man who goes clubbing and dates women with plumped-up lips and stiletto heels.

She is a teenager, not particularly striking in appearance, but strong-willed and exceptionally bright. The familiar Cinderella. The familiar Beauty and the Beast. The simple, kind, intelligent heroine who wins over a heart of darkness.

They spend three school years together. He teaches; she sits in the front row. They go on school trips to Paris and Amsterdam. He flirts with the boundaries of seduction; she is hopelessly in love but keeps her feelings to herself. Nothing happens. During the summer, he never contacts her. Perhaps she has merely imagined his interest in her.

There is a flicker of something. Perhaps the teacher senses that something might happen between them. He is flattered by the passion he inspires and touched by her sweetness, but he holds back. Better not to complicate his life or risk being reported to the authorities.

And that might have been the end of it, if she were not made of the same stuff as romantic heroines.

She is Catherine Earnshaw. She is Elizabeth Bennet. She is Anna Karenina. She is Bella Swan.

She is the pillar that supports this immense love. She is the heart that beats for him, alongside his own.

I don’t know whether the invisible thread connecting Antonio and Iryanne truly exists. I don’t know whether there is any truth in the idea of destined souls, that feeling of being “alone yet united” even in the middle of a crowd.

Was it a great love that never came to fruition, or a magnificent illusion? A childish crush or an everlasting feeling?

Iryanne’s love never fades. It overflows, sweeps everything away. It is eternal, burning, obsessive, transcendent, romantic. Beautiful precisely because it remains unfulfilled.

What would have happened if the two protagonists had fulfilled their dream? Would their love have survived the intrusion of reality? Would Antonio have cheated on Iryanne with the first woman who came along? And would that tormented, passionate love have survived his ageing, the corrosive acid of everyday life?

Perhaps better never to have lived it. Better to remember it forever as it was in their school days: tender and impossible.

The most successful aspect of this story is neither its plot nor its novelistic ending, but the fierce, aching power of memory.

The moments spent in Paris during the school trip become indelible memories, which the mere scent of a croissant can bring rushing back. The violent force of nostalgia still makes her knees tremble and her heart race, transporting her back in an instant.

All it takes is brushing her fingers against an old anchor-shaped necklace, or looking at a faded photograph, and suddenly she is thirty years younger again: a schoolgirl on a class trip, desperately in love as she will never be again.

Those days are gone, and they will never return. Those beautiful, blessed, crystal-clear days when it was still possible to take a step, say a word, give a kiss that would have changed everything.

Not anymore. Now it is too late.

A beautifully written book, with only a few minor flaws, that touched me, moved me, tore me apart and held me captive.

Because only the greatest souls are capable of a love like that.