Ten Things I've Learnt About Love
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Alice is back in the family house that has never felt like home, waiting out the last few days of her father's life and yearning to escape. Across the city, a homeless man named Daniel searches for the daughter he has always loved but never met.
Connected by a secret, Alice and Daniel are about to cross paths in unexpected and life-changing ways . . .
Alice has just returned to London from months of travelling abroad. She is late to hear the news that her father is dying, and arrives at the family home only just in time to say goodbye. Daniel hasn't had a roof over his head for years, but to him the city of London feels like home in a way that no bricks and mortar ever did. He spends every day searching for his daughter; the daughter he has never met. Until now . . . Heart-wrenching and life-affirming, Ten Things I've Learnt About Love is a unique story of love lost and found, of rootlessness and homecoming and the power of the ties that bind. It is a story for fathers and daughters everywhere from debut novelist, Sarah Butler.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alice, the youngest of three sisters, has felt oddly disconnected from her family since the death of her mother when she was four. Leaving her father and siblings and a failed romance in London, she sets out to travel the world, wandering from place to place until her sisters summon her home because their father is dying of pancreatic cancer. Alice is adrift and unsettled, unable to communicate her love to her father before he dies, and self-conscious about her choices when compared to her sisters. Alice alternates narration with Daniel, a 60-year old homeless man whose heart troubles are causing him to revisit his past, including the affair he had with a married woman. As Alice moves forward, cleaning her deceased father's house and making peace with her sisters, Daniel works up the courage to approach her. The relationship they build is unusual, and Butler's elegant prose interspersed with thoughtful lists, such as "Ten things I know about my mother" and "Ten foods that stress me out," written by Alice and Daniel makes this a moving debut.