The Course of Love - Hardcover

De Botton, Alain

4.02

43,620 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241145473 ISBN 13: 9780241145470

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2016

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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.

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Review:

Publisher's description. Rabih and Kirsten meet, fall in love, get married. Think this is the end of the story? It's only the beginning. With his trademark warmth and wit, Alain de Botton explores modern relationships with a novel that asks what it truly means to love and to be loved. (Penguin)

Anyone who is, has been, or would ever like to be, in a satisfying, successful relationship, would do well to read de Botton. A brave couple might even read it together (Irish Independent)

Alain de Botton's gift is to prompt us to think about how we live (Jeanette Winterson)

Curious, humorous and dazzling... It contains more human interest than most fiction (John Updike on 'How Proust Can Change Your Life')

His prose is lovely: clear, gently persuasive, light of touch (Observer on Religion for Atheists)

Alain de Botton likes to take big, complex subjects and write about them with thoughtful and deceptive innocence

(Observer on The Architecture of Happiness)

Engaging, sympathetic, meticulous, acutely perceptive...There's a refreshing honesty in what De Botton has to say (The Guardian)

Well-observed and imbued with a tenderness that feels authentic and uncynical. It may even save some marriages (Evening Standard)

Thought-provoking... [a] worldly wise romance (Mail on Sunday)

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

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