The Course of Love - Hardcover

De Botton, Alain

4.02

43,624 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771027613 ISBN 13: 9780771027611

Publisher: Signal, 2016

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In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children -- but no relationship is as simple as "happily ever after." The Course of Love is a novel that explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain love, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. With philosophical insight and psychological acumen, Alain de Botton shows that our Romantic dreams may do us a grave disservice -- and explores what the alternatives might be. The conclusion, as the characters gradually discover, is that love is not "an enthusiasm," but rather a "skill" that must be slowly and often painfully learnt.
This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term.

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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)

He's completely on the money with the minutiae of marital life and every note rings uncomfortably true. The story is told with great wit and affection... de Botton knows his stuff and the book builds into a truly wonderful and positive analysis of a successful lifelong partnership. It should be compulsory reading for anyone contemplating tying the knot. (Daily Mail)

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

One passage was so spot-on that I read it aloud to my husband... De Botton appreciates, as few writers do, the miracle and subtlety of the so-called ordinary (The Times)

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

[A] worldly wise romance (Mail on Sunday)

A complete delight (Amy Bloom, author of 'Lucky us')

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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