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Book Summary and Reviews of A Forty Year Kiss by Nickolas Butler

A Forty Year Kiss by Nickolas Butler

A Forty Year Kiss

A Novel

by Nickolas Butler

  • Publishes:
  • Feb 4, 2025, 352 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the critically acclaimed author of Shotgun Lovesongs comes an exquisitely written, small-town story about one couple's hard-won second chance at love, forty years after their divorce.

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he's not sure what he'll find. He is sure of one thing -- he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past. But forty years is a long time. It's forty years of other relationships, forty years of building new lives, and forty years of long-held regrets, mistakes, and painful secrets.

A brave and triumphant exploration of redemption and sunset triumph, A Forty Year Kiss is a once-in-a-lifetime love story, written with dazzling lyricism and remarkable clarity of spirit, from a celebrated author at the top of his game. It's a literary valentine that promises to be a love story for the ages.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"A big-hearted, comforting novel about second chances―at love, at recovery, at forgiveness and redemption. Butler treats all his characters with dignity and affection. When we die, we'd all be lucky to come back as a character in a Nickolas Butler novel." ―Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring

"Life-affirming and straight up beautiful. Will stoke the good fire in your chest. I absolutely loved it. A must-read." ―Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook

"Thank you, Nickolas Butler, for writing a love story that feels so powerfully real, a story that captures the hope, grace, and joy of new love―but also the mistakes, scar tissue, and regret of past love. It's a wonder to behold, a novel capable of such breadth. This is the kind of book that makes me a better human." ―Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness

This information about A Forty Year Kiss 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.

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Author Information

Nickolas Butler Author Biography

Photo: OliveJuiceStudios.com

Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of the internationally-best selling novel Shotgun Lovesongs, a collection of short stories entitled, Beneath the Bonfire, and The Hearts of Men which has already been longlisted for two of France's top literary awards.  He is the winner of France's prestigious PAGE Prix America, the 2014 Great Lakes Great Reads Award, the 2014 Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, the 2015 Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award, the 2015 UW-Whitewater Chancellor's Regional Literary Award, and has been long-listed for the 2014 Flaherty Dunnan Award for ...

... Full Biography

Other books by Nickolas Butler at BookBrowse
  • The Hearts of Men jacket
  • Shotgun Lovesongs jacket
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