The One That Got Away
A Novel
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3.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A stunning love story that had my heart racing from the first chapter and tears streaming down my face by the end. An instant favorite." —Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Meet Me at the Lake
Two years together.
Twenty years apart.
One day to change their story.
2000. Benjamin’s world is turned upside down the night he meets Clara. Instinctively, he knows that they are meant for each other, but a devastating mistake on their last night at university will take their lives in very different directions.
20 years later, Clara has a high-profile job and a handsome husband. But despite the trappings of success, she isn't happy, and she knows that a piece of her heart still belongs to Benjamin, the boy she fell in love with years earlier. The boy whose life she fears she ruined.
When a bombing is reported in the city where they first met, Clara is pulled back to a place she tries not to remember and the first love she could never forget. Searching for Benjamin, Clara is forced to confront the events that tore them apart. But is it too late to put right what went wrong?
Across the miles and spanning decades, Charlotte Rixon's The One That Got Away is a sweeping, poignant story about growing up, growing apart, the people who first steal our hearts, and the surprising, winding roads that love can take us on, for readers of Jill Santopolo, Rosie Walsh, and Colleen Hoover.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rixon debuts with a poignant and gripping second chance romance. When Brits Clara and Benjamin first meet in college, it's love at first sight. Both on the cusp of adulthood, their all-consuming relationship hits the rocks as they struggle with life's harsh realities, including sickness and death in both of their families. Then, right before graduation, a devastating accident almost ruins both their futures and destroys their relationship. Twenty years later, they've both attempted to move on: Benjamin is a single father whose only regret is his relationship with his son's alcoholic mother, while Clara is married, has a successful career, and is writing her first novel—but she can't help feeling unhappy. Then a bomb explodes in the town where they met, triggering both to remember the pasts they had buried and sending Clara racing to reunite with Benjamin. Rixon takes on a lot of heavy subjects, including cancer, addiction, sexual assault, and manslaughter, making this not a romance to turn to for escapism. It is, however, a raw and aching examination of lost opportunities and what-ifs. This sometimes grim but always evocative portrait of first love reunited tugs at the heartstrings.
