Sweet Sorrow: The Long-Awaited New Novel from the Best-Selling Author of One Day
"A tale of first love that hits all the right notes . . . [it] just might be the sweetest book to brighten your late summer." --The Washington Post
"Dazzles with wit."--People
From the bestselling author of One Day comes a bittersweet and brilliantly funny coming-of-age tale about the heart-stopping thrill of first love--and how one summer can forever change a life.
Now: On the verge of marriage and a fresh start, thirty-eight year old Charlie Lewis finds that he can't stop thinking about the past, and the events of one particular summer.
Then: Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don't remember in the school photograph. He's failing his classes. At home he looks after his depressed father--when surely it should be the other way round--and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread.
But when Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope.
In order to spend time with Fran, Charlie must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling: The price of hope, it seems, is Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet learned and performed in a theater troupe over the course of a summer.
Now: Charlie can't go the altar without coming to terms with his relationship with Fran, his friends, and his former self. Poignant, funny, enchanting, devastating, Sweet Sorrow is a tragicomedy about the rocky path to adulthood and the confusion of family life, a celebration of the reviving power of friendship and that brief, searing explosion of first love that can only be looked at directly after it has burned out.
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David Nicholls is the best-selling author of Us, One Day, The Understudy and Starter for Ten. His novels have sold over eight million copies worldwide and are published in forty languages. Nicholls trained as an actor before making the switch to writing, and he recently won a BAFTA for Patrick Melrose, his adaptation of the novels by Edward St Aubyn, which also won him an Emmy nomination. He lives in London.
"The lines come thick and fast throughout the novel, but they do not compromise the emotional core of social alienation, young love and (minor spoiler) what we think in retrospect. In all, it is a bravura performance from someone with a track record in fashioning books that are both eminently readable and emotionally subtle. Sweet Sorrow manages to be interesting, moving, hilarious, and sad at the same time."--Scotland on Sunday "Full of the joy and pain of first love, fans who fell for bestseller One Day 10 years ago, won't be disappointed." --Sunday Mirror "If ever there was an author perfect to take with you on holiday (so to speak), it's David Nicholls. Make space in your case." --Telegraph "Nicholls avoids sentimentality or mawkishness to capture perfectly the angst, the pain and the awkwardness of falling in love for the first time."--The Bookseller "Nineties nostalgia backdrops a story that feels so authentic, it could be a memoir." --iPaper "Tellingly captures the giddy confusion of first love mired in family turbulence and the bewilderment of making decisions, and not knowing if things will land the way you want them to. Endearing and nostalgic, it nudges your 16-year-old self into being. A delicious, pensive summer read." --Press Association
