Sweet Sorrow
The Sunday Times bestselling novel from the author of ONE DAY and YOU ARE HERE
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4.2 • 38 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Sweet Sorrow: a novel of the searing explosion of first love, and the rocky path to adulthood
'A beautiful paean to young love'
OBSERVER
'Fizzing'
GUARDIAN
'A glorious escape to the sunlit uplands of the 1990s'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'Exquisite'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'The sense of nostalgia is visceral and intense, almost time-bending'
SUNDAY TIMES
Everyone has that one summer.
It's 1997 and Charlie Lewis is stuck. School is over, his family is breaking up, his father is falling apart and the long, empty holidays stretch ahead towards an uncertain future.
And then, quite by chance, Charlie meets Fran Fisher and it's as if a new world has opened before him.
But can it last?
Twenty years later, Charlie tells the story.
ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST ACCLAIMED WRITERS
'One of the most astute chroniclers of England as it is now'
FINANCIAL TIMES
'An uncanny ability to make us laugh out loud, but also care passionately about his characters'
DAILY TELEGRAPH
'Nicholls writes with such tender precision about love'
THE TIMES
'No one else writes novels that are both relatable and revelatory in the way he does'
EVENING STANDARD
'Genuinely brilliant'
NEW STATESMAN
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It's tough to think of a modern writer that captures what love is about better than David Nicholls. The unpretentious relatability, the beautifully observed small details, the clarity with which he writes about heartbreak; all these trademark flourishes are present on his fifth novel. Sweet Sorrow is a gorgeous tale of first love and a coming-of-age story that’ll spark nostalgia and red-faced recognition. It’s also very, very funny. Our hero is Charlie: a 16-year-old heading into the summer low on confidence and prospects. His horizons are suddenly broadened spectacularly and terrifyingly by—quite predictably—a girl, and—quite unpredictably—Shakespeare. As we all know, the course of true love never did run smooth, and Nicholls guides us beautifully through a glorious summer you’ll not want to end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A teenager experiences heady first love amid an amateur Shakespeare production in this amusing coming-of-age novel from Nicholls (One Day). Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, certain he failed his school exams, spends the summer of 1997 working under the table at a small-town gas station, "too far away from London to be a suburb" and "too developed to count as countryside." There, he avoids caring for his unemployed father while stealing small sums of cash to cover household expenses. When he meets Fran Fisher, a girl his age from a much nicer private school, he gets swept into participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet. Fran and Charlie have delightful banter as their attraction blooms, and he builds rapport with the other actors while hiding his participation from his boorish school friends. After his boss uncovers his gas station thefts, the fallout has consequences, not the least being the ruin of a carefully planned weekend of sexual exploration with Fran. While the story lopes along fairly predictably, Nicholls excels at capturing Charlie's insecurity, the messy exuberance of first love, and the coarseness of teenage male friendships. This doesn't quite reach the heights of Nicholls's previous work, but it is a good deal of fun.
Customer Reviews
Sweet Sorrow
David is a masterful story teller, weaving laughingly-accurate metaphors through a rising crescendo of storyline. Jumping backwards & forwards in time can be infuriating, but he does it in a way that slowly hooks you into the story, and eases the pressure during painfully real parts of the plot. As much as I enjoyed the story, in a “loving-the-characters-in-all-of-their-humdrum-normality” kind of way, I can’t help feeling a bit cheated & saddened at the end. And not in the same, “cry-your-eyes-out” way that I did with the perfection of the love story in “One Day”. But then, I guess this is more like real life, rather than the escapism that we read romantic fiction for...