Sweet Sorrow: The long-awaited new novel from the best-selling author of ONE DAY
3.5/5
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About this ebook
“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.
David Nicholls
David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten; The Understudy; One Day; Us, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; Sweet Sorrow; and You Are Here. He is also a screenwriter who has also written adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Great Expectations, as well as his own novels, Starter for Ten, One Day, and Us. His adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, was nominated for an Emmy and won him a BAFTA for best writer. Nicholls is also the Executive Producer and a contributing screenwriter on a new Netflix adaptation of One Day.
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Reviews for Sweet Sorrow
65 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5David Nicholls tells the story of the summer after Charlie finished school, when he becomes involved with an amateur theater group preparing to put on Romeo and Juliet. His entire reason is to get a girl to notice him. As he gets roped into playing Benvolio, he looks back at his disastrous exam results and falls in love with a girl from the posh private school, as he struggles to take care of his father. Nicholls writes with such lightness and humor about some darker topics. Even as the reader watches Charlie race toward disaster, it's done with such assurance that he will survive (the novel is told from the point of view of a much older Charlie) and even thrive in the end, that it's somehow more effective. This is very well-done chick-lit, where the main character is a young man. It'a a shame that since the genre is so woman-oriented that it's seen more as trashy escapism for the ladies, than as a genre with wide appeal, because novels that are written with a lightness of tone about serious events and issues require more talent and skill than a more heavy-handed approach to the same situations. Of Nicholls's novels, this one most resembles Starter for Ten, being a coming-of-age novel about leaving home and finding oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Charlie describes himself someone who never stands out, but he has a self-deprecating charm and a resilience that makes him very good company.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent. Humour, but also darkness. Too realistic to be called 'romance'.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sweet Sorrow (Hodder & Stoughton) by David Nicholls is not my usual cup of tea, but he once again shows his skill in combining good writing with really accessible story telling. The saccharine is dialled up just a tad too much for my taste on this occasion but the book demonstrates the author’s talent; to release this in the same year that he won the Best Drama Writer BAFTA for his adaptation of the Patrick Melrose novel – and against incredibly strong competition – shows extraordinary breadth.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was a sweet and touching story of first love. It takes place in the summer of 1997 and tells the story of Charlie Lewis and Fran Fisher. They are part of a summer theatre group putting on a performance of Romeo and Juliet. I found it to be very realistic - the characters were likable, down to earth and genuinely behaved like teenagers. It did get to be a little long at times. I felt like all the detailed backstory with Charlie's parents wasn't really necessary and his friendship with his school friends didn't do much more than portray how people change. But it was well written and an overall enjoyable book. I could definitely see it being made into a movie in the future. Thanks to BookishFirst for the ARC.