Us: A Novel - Couverture souple

“The Petersen family travels through Europe with more emotional baggage than luggage in Nicholls’s winning follow-up to his 2009 bestseller One Day....Few authors do messed-up relationships better than Nicholls.” (People, Book of the Week)

“Nicholls is a deft craftsman, a skilled storyteller and a keen observer of contemporary mores.” (Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review)

“In his latest...Mr. Nicholls again deals with love lost and possibly found, offering an unpredictable (and less grim) ending.... Mr. Nicholls mines the setup for laughs, as he should, but he also provides a poignant story of regret in middle age.” (New York Times)

“A great novel...Nicholls is a master of nuanced relationships. He’s also a pro at delivering a tight, clever structural narrative, as he proved in his terrific previous novel One Day.” (Entertainment Weekly)

“I loved this book. Funny, sad, tender: for anyone who wants to know what happens after the Happy Ever After.” (Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and One Plus One)

“Wonderful. A novel that manages to be both truly hilarious and deeply affecting. I loved it.” (S.J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep)

“Nicholls is a delightfully funny writer...and this over-planned vacation makes ripe material for comedy...Us evolves into a poignant consideration of how a marriage ages, how parents mess up and what survives despite all those challenges.” (Washington Post)

“A smartly optimistic romantic comedy that uses angst and humor to illuminate the resilience of the human heart... Part requiem, part reboot, Douglas’s...efforts to preserve his disintegrating family take him on another kind of journey, too, from despair to unexpected joy.” (O Magazine, November 2014)

“A thoughtful, funny, authentic story...Pitch-perfect dialogue and seamless action propel the story forward in a way that feels cinematic....This is the kind of book that reminds us what it means to be alive. How often does a reader get to feel that?” (Good Housekeeping)

“But for all of their burdens and battles, Douglas and Connie have moments of real joy in their marriage and while it doesn’t always seem like a pleasure, reading about it sure is.” (Time magazine)

David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his enormously popular New York Times bestseller, One Day, to a compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart.

Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Hoping to encourage her son’s artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie.

Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of marriage and parenthood, the regrets of abandoning youth for middle age, and the intricate relationship between the heart and the head. And in David Nicholls’s gifted hands, Douglas’s odyssey brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafés of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?