Miss You
The Wildly Romantic Richard & Judy Book Club Pick
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
A Richard and Judy Book Club pick and a Radio 2 Book Club Choice.
Get to know Tess and Gus in Kate Eberlen's wildly romantic Miss You, perfect for fans of David Nicholls and Jojo Moyes.
Tess and Gus are meant to be. They just haven't met properly yet. And perhaps they never will . . .
Today is the first day of the rest of your life is the motto on a plate in the kitchen at home, and Tess can’t get it out of her head, even though she’s in Florence for a final, idyllic holiday before university.
Gus and his parents are also on holiday in Florence – and, for one day, the paths of these two eighteen-year-olds will criss-cross before they each return to England.
Over the course of the next sixteen years, life and love will offer them very different challenges. Separated by distance and chance, there’s no way the two of them are ever going to meet each other properly . . . or is there?
'Gloriously romantic . . . One of those rare books that has you laughing and crying at the same time' – Prima Magazine
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We read almost all of Kate Eberlen’s delicious debut in one sitting. Miss You is a tumultuous love story of boy-nearly-meets-girl. Tess and Gus are the novel’s mixed-up and incredibly relatable leads, strangers but for a brief meeting as pre-university teens. Eberlen expertly charts her characters’ parallel paths of giddying highs and crushing bereavements. Ultimately, however, it’s her ability to capture the pathos and comfort in the everyday and domestic that had us tearing through chapters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Eberlen's debut novel, Tess and Gus first meet in 1997, while traveling in Florence. Both are awaiting the results of their college entrance exams, and both seem to have bright futures: Tess as a writer and Gus as a physician. Gus, however, is awash in grief and guilt following the death of his overbearing older brother, unreasonably blaming himself for the fatal accident. And Tess is about to experience a loss of her own, as her mother's cancer advances and Tess's future grows less certain. Over the course of the next 16 years, as they individually fumble through romantic shortcomings, familial frustrations, and professional setbacks, the two narrowly miss one another several more times; these missed connections, however, are never particularly clever or dramatic and the narrative fails to build a case that the two are, in fact, meant to be together. In the end, Eberlen's novel is more successful as a chronicle of the way grief and loss shapes young people's life choices than it is as a romance. Consequently, the denouement lands unconvincingly.