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From the best-selling author of One Day comes a bittersweet and brilliantly funny coming-of-age tale about the heart-stopping thrill of first love - and how just 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.
"As Charlie notes, displaying a growing understanding of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet '[is] stuffed with anticipation,' and readers will be, too, as Nicholls masterfully unfolds events. The depth of feeling between friends, family members, and lovers, first time or not—Nicholls captures it all. Highly recommended." - Library Journal (starred review)
"With fully fleshed-out characters, terrific dialogue, bountiful humor, and genuinely affecting scenes, this is really the full package of a rewarding, romantic read." - Booklist (starred review)
"While the narrative stakes aren't very high and the plot ambles through some predictable paces, the developing relationship between the two young lovers is charming...An old-fashioned, endearing romance for readers with time to spare." - Kirkus Reviews
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"A beautiful paean to young love...Sweet Sorrow is a book that does what Nicholls does best, sinking the reader deep into a nostalgic memory-scape, pinning the narrative to a love story that manages to be moving without ever tipping over into sentimentality, all of it composed with deftness, intelligence and, most importantly, humour." - Guardian (UK)
"Nicholls' literary talents are impressive...the sense of nostalgia is visceral and intense, almost time-bending." - Sunday Times (UK)
"A compassionate, intelligent look at the raw pain and loneliness of a teenage boy, the everyday miracle of first love and the perennial power of Shakespeare's language." - Spectator (UK)
"[Nicholls] remains one of the most acute chroniclers of England as it is now…and few can rival his grasp of the period's minor-key class signifiers…And of course the novel skips along merrily; the repartee frequently sparkles, the jokes are genuinely funny, walk-on characters are brilliantly sketched into life, and his genuine affection for the main players is evident throughout." - Financial Times (UK)
"David Nicholls' Sweet Sorrow perfectly captures the intensity of first love, the beauty of a chosen family, and the complexity of transforming from a teenager to an adult. These are characters I'll be thinking about for a long time to come." - Jill Santopolo, New York Times bestselling author of The Light We Lost
This information about Sweet Sorrow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten, The Understudy, One Day, Us and Sweet Sorrow. One Day was published in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim: translated into 40 languages, it became a global bestseller, selling millions of copies worldwide. His fourth novel, Us, was longlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. On screen, David has written adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Great Expectations, as well as of 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. The Netflix adaptation of One Day was executive-produced by David.
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