Sweet sorrow

Review by Booklist Review

Lounging in tall grass in a quiet corner of his small, English town, certain that he failed his end-of-school exams and is headed precisely nowhere, Charlie doesn't realize he's trespassing on the rehearsals for a summer production of the ultimate tragic romance. Out of nowhere appears Fran, Juliet of course, who trips and falls, and that's it. Love at first sight will make a sullen teenager do crazy things, even join a socially unacceptable theatre troupe. It would be fair to guess what happens next, right down to Charlie's casting as Benvolio and some magnificent usage of Shakespeare's text. There's so much readers won't expect, though, dramas of all sorts, and so much bittersweet joy in Nicholl's telling. As Charlie, on the eve of marriage 20 years later, recalls that positively life-altering summer, Nicholls' (Us, 2014; One Day, 2010) addictive story is as much about time's passage as it is about love of many kinds. He collapses years and draws out hours, like love does, and keeps up a briskly paced structural sleight of hand in Charlie's leaps through his memory. With fully fleshed-out characters, terrific dialogue, bountiful humor, and genuinely affecting scenes, this is really the full package of a rewarding, romantic read.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Already a bestseller in the UK, this will easily work its way into US readers' hearts just like Nicholls' previous books have.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A teenager experiences heady first love amid an amateur Shakespeare production in this amusing coming-of-age novel from Nicholls (One Day). Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, certain he failed his school exams, spends the summer of 1997 working under the table at a small-town gas station, "too far away from London to be a suburb" and "too developed to count as countryside." There, he avoids caring for his unemployed father while stealing small sums of cash to cover household expenses. When he meets Fran Fisher, a girl his age from a much nicer private school, he gets swept into participating in a production of Romeo and Juliet. Fran and Charlie have delightful banter as their attraction blooms, and he builds rapport with the other actors while hiding his participation from his boorish school friends. After his boss uncovers his gas station thefts, the fallout has consequences, not the least being the ruin of a carefully planned weekend of sexual exploration with Fran. 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. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents. (May)

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Review by Library Journal Review

With his usual grace, Nicholls (Us; One Day) plumbs human relationships, this time offering a singular reading experience about one young man's fraught coming of age. At age 38 and on the verge of marriage, Charlie Lewis looks back at his hapless 16-year-old self: His mother has left, taking only his younger sister, and he's stuck tending his depressed, heavy-drinking, financially floundering dad, which brings on a funk that wrecks Charlie's academic career and likely any chance of attending college. Then he meets the seemingly unreachable Fran, not rich but from a more established family, and he overcomes his class self-consciousness and apprehension of Shakespeare to join a production of Romeo and Juliet in which she's starring, just to be near her. He's no Olivier, but his life is subtly reshaped by the camaraderie of the acting life, which former actor Nicholls articulates beautifully. Meanwhile, Charlie and Fran spar wittily as they build toward a relationship that feels fresh and unexpected when it arrives. VERDICT 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.--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Nicholls' leisurely, nostalgic, and often amusing novel traces the coming-of-age of an adolescent boy in 1997 Britain. The author of Us (2014) homes in on one mildly eventful summer. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis, looking back from a point 20 years in the future, has just finished secondary school in a little town "too far away from London to be a suburb, too large to be a village, too developed to count as countryside." Anxious about his parents' recent separation, which has left him alone to cope with his unemployed, clinically depressed father, he hasn't been paying attention in school and flubbed his exams, making it unlikely that he will head off to university with his friends. When he's not working a few hours a week under the table at a local gas station, where he nets some extra money by pulling off a low-level scam, he's left with plenty of time on his hands. One day, after sneaking into a local estate to sit in the grass and read a Vonnegut novel, he meets and falls hard for upper-class, relatively sophisticated Fran Fisher. She agrees to go out with him for coffee a week later on the condition that he join in a local summer production of Romeo and Juliet in which she is playing Juliet. Reluctantly, he does so and learns to love Shakespeare as well as Fran. Narrator Charlie, now happily on the brink of marrying someone else, looks back on this period of his life with affection and a touch of compassion for the bewildered boy he used to be. 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, with none of the feverish highs or lows of the play they often reference. Charlie and his theatrical colleagues make good company, and even the fraught family situation is satisfactorily resolved. An old-fashioned, endearing romance for readers with time to spare. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The End of the World The world would end at five to four, just after the disco.       Our final day at Merton Grange Secondary School had arrived, brilliant and bright and commencing with skirmishes at the gates; school ties worn as bandanas and tourniquets, in knots as compact as a walnut or fat as a fist, with enough lipstick and jewelry and dyed blue hair to resemble some futuristic nightclub scene. What were the teachers going to do on our last day, send us home? They sighed and waved us through. The last week of formal lessons had been spent in desultory, dispiriting classes about something called "adult life," which would, it seemed, consist largely of filling in forms and compiling a CV ("Hobbies and Interests: Socializing, watching television"). We learned how to balance a checkbook. We stared out of the window at the lovely day and thought, not long now. Four, three, two . . .       Back in our form room at break we began to graffiti our white school shirts with felt-tips and Magic Markers, kids hunched over each other's backs like tattooists in a Russian jail, marking all available space with sentimental abuse. Take care of yourself, you dick, wrote Paul Fox. This shirt stinks, wrote Chris Lloyd. In a lyrical mood, my best friend Martin Harper wrote mates4ever beneath a finely detailed cock and balls.       Harper and Fox and Lloyd. These were my best friends at the time, not just boys but the boys--the group was self-sufficient and impenetrable. Though none of us played an instrument, we'd imagined ourselves as a band. Harper, we all knew, was lead guitar and vocals. Fox was bass, a low and basic thump-thump-thump. Lloyd, because he proclaimed himself "mad," was the drummer, which left me as . . .       "Maracas," Lloyd had said, and we'd laughed, and "maracas" was added to the long list of nicknames. Fox drew them on my school shirt now, maracas crossed beneath a skull, like military insignia. Mr. Ambrose, feet up on the desk, kept his eyes fixed on the video of Free Willy 2 that played in the background, a special treat ignored by everyone.       In our final assembly, Mr. Pascoe made the speech that we'd all expected, encouraging us to look to the future but remember the past, to aim high but weather the lows, to believe in ourselves but think of others. The important thing was not only what we'd learned--and he hoped we'd learned a great deal!--but also the kind of young adults we'd become, and we listened, young adults, stuck between cynicism and sentimentality, boisterous on the surface but secretly daunted and sad. We sneered and rolled our eyes but elsewhere in the hall hands gripped other hands and snuffles were heard as we were urged to cherish the friendships we'd made, the friendships that would last a lifetime.       "A lifetime? Christ, I hope not," said Fox, locking my head beneath his arm, fondly rubbing his knuckles there. It was prize-giving time, and we sank low in our chairs. Prizes were awarded to the kids who always got the prizes, applause fading long before they'd left the stage to stand in front of the photographer from the local press, book tokens held beneath the chin as if in an ID parade. We sank lower in our chairs until horizontal, then, when it was over, we shuffled out to have our photo taken. But I realize how absent I am from the above. I remember the day well enough even across twenty years, but when I try to describe my role, I find myself reaching for what I saw and heard, rather than anything I said or did. "What were you like?" my future wife would later ask, "before we met?" and I'd struggle to reply. As a student, my distinctive feature was a lack of distinction. "Charlie works hard to meet basic standards and for the most part achieves them"; this was as good as it got, and even that slight reputation had been dimmed by events of the exam season. Not admired but not despised, not adored but not feared; I was not a bully, though I knew a fair few, but did not intervene or place myself between the pack and the victim, because I wasn't brave either. I neither conformed nor rebelled, collaborated nor resisted; I stayed out of trouble without getting into anything else. Comedy was our great currency, and while I was not a class clown, neither was I witless. I might occasionally get a surprised laugh from the crowd, but my best jokes were either drowned out by someone with a louder voice or came far too late, so that even now, more than twenty years later, I think of things I should have said in '96 or '97. I knew that I was not ugly--someone would have told me--and was vaguely aware of whispers and giggles from huddles of girls, but what use was this to someone with no idea what to say? I'd inherited height, and only height, from my father, my eyes, nose, teeth and mouth from Mum--the right way round, said Dad--but I'd also inherited his tendency to stoop and round my shoulders in order to take up less space in the world. Some lucky quirk of glands and hormones meant that I'd been spared the pulsing spots and boils that literally scarred so many adolescences, and I was neither skinny with anxiety nor plump with the chips and canned drinks that fueled us, but I wasn't confident about my appearance. I wasn't confident about anything at all.       Soon it would be time for my friends and me to settle into some role we might plausibly fit, but when I tried to see myself as others saw me (sometimes literally, late at night, staring profoundly into my father's shaving mirror, hair slicked back), I saw . . . nothing special. In photos of myself from that time, I'm reminded of those early incarnations of a cartoon character, the prototypes that resemble the later version but are in some way out of proportion, not quite right.       None of which is much help. Imagine, then, another photograph, the school group shot that everybody owns, faces too small to make out without peering closely. Whether it's five or fifty years old, there's always a vaguely familiar figure in the middle row, someone with no anecdotes or associations, no scandals or triumphs, to their name. You wonder: who was that?       That's Charlie Lewis. Excerpted from Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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