The Course of Love - Hardcover

De Botton, Alain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241145473 ISBN 13: 9780241145470

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2016

Synopsis

SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

Twenty years after his bestselling debut Essays in Love, internationally acclaimed author Alain de Botton returns to fiction with a brilliant new novel about modern relationships

What does it mean to live happily ever after?

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily -- it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next?

Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning.

From the first thrill of lust, to the joys and fears of real commitment, to the deep problems that surface slowly over two shared lifetimes, this is the story of a marriage. It is the story of modern relationships and how to survive them. Playful, wise and profoundly moving, The Course of Love is a delightful return to the novel by Alain de Botton, twenty years after his debut Essays in Love.

About this title

About the Author

Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, A Week at the Airport, Religion for Atheists, The News: A User's Manual, and latest novel The Course of Love, among many others. Alain is a bestselling author in 30 countries. He lives in London, where he runs The School of Life and Living Architecture.

From the Back Cover

He has fallen in love with her calm, her faith that it will be OK, her absence of fatalism - these are the virtues of his new Scottish friend.

She has fallen in love, equally fast and hard and true, with the reserved sweetness and Levantine exoticism of this sad-eyed boy from Beirut.

And so we have a marriage: a hopeful gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they have carefully omitted to investigate...

'The Course of Love probes the very heart of marriage, its shifts and squalls, its great adventure, with such forensic tenderness . I laughed a lot, too' Deborah Moggach

From the Inside Flap

What does it mean to live happily ever after?

At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next?

Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning.

From the first thrill of lust, to the joys and fears of real commitment, to the deep problems that surface slowly over two shared lifetimes, this is the story of a marriage. It is the story of modern relationships and how to survive them. Playful, wise and profoundly moving, The Course of Love is a delightful return to the novel by Alain de Botton, twenty years after his debut Essays in Love.

A HAMISH HAMILTON BOOK

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241145473
• ISBN 13: 9780241145470
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240