Before She Met Me

The bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending delivers “a remarkably original and subtle book” (The New York Review of Books) about the nature of love and jealousy. At the start of this fiendishly comic and suspenseful novel, a mild-mannered English academic chuckles as he watches his wife commit adultery. The action takes place before she met him. But lines between film and reality, past and present become terrifyingly blurred in this sad and funny tour de force from the author of Flaubert's Parrot.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

From the last time Linda and Thomas meet, at a charmless hotel in a distant city, to the moment, thirty-five years earlier, when a chance encounter on a rocky beach binds them fatefully together, this hypnotically compelling novel unfolds a tale of intense passion, drama, and suspense. The Last Time They Met is a singularly ambitious and accomplished work by one of today's most widely celebrated novelists.

A Million Little Pieces meets What Men Don't Talk About -- a raw, heartfelt memoir and a poignant insight into the emotional life of men “Was this anything akin to love, this melodrama we seemed to bring out in each other? Was she really the one? I was trying my best to make her the one, or at least the one with whom I would stay. But one way or another, sooner or later, I knew I’d leave, she’d leave, we’d break up. I knew this. When hadn’t we – when hadn’t I? Every time.” At the age of forty-four, with the wreckage of a dozen broken relationships smoking behind him, Alan Close was single again. Again! This time, he decided to stop and take stock – and make a change. With unflinching honesty, Close explored his relationships, affairs, family history and struggle with a secret eating disorder in a desire for intimacy and peace with the past. No man has ever written about relationships in this way. Humorous, lyrical and disarmingly candid, this memoir from novelist and former Good Weekend columnist Alan Close takes us inside what is to be a man today. Beautifully written and utterly compelling, it reveals much about men’s emotions and their attitudes towards relationships. It holds a mirror to male readers and provides a rare insight for women.

“Lisa Jewell leaves the chick-lit tag firmly behind with Before I Met You, a poignant story about a young woman uncovering her grandmother’s bohemian life in 1920s London—and finding her own place in the world in the process.”—Good Housekeeping (UK) “Jewell’s moving novel immerses readers in the lives of these unique characters through the universal themes of family and a search for belonging...a compelling and entertaining novel.” —Publishers Weekly Jazz Age London, a passionate and forbidden interracial romance, and the unbreakable bond between a bright young woman and her eccentric grandmother come together brilliantly in this gem of a novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone, perfect for fans of Downton Abbey, Twenties Girl, and The Chaperone. After her grandmother Arlette’s death, Betty is finally ready to begin her life. She had forfeited university, parties, boyfriends, summer jobs—all the usual preoccupations of a woman her age—in order to care for Arlette in their dilapidated, albeit charming home on the English island of Guernsey. Her will included a beneficiary unknown to Betty and her family, a woman named Clara Pickle who presumably could be found at a London address. Now, having landed on a rather shabby street corner in ’90s Soho, Betty is determined to find the mysterious Clara. She’s ready for whatever life has to throw her way. Or so she thinks... In 1920s bohemian London, Arlette De La Mare is starting her new life in a time of postwar change. Beautiful and charismatic, she is soon drawn into the hedonistic world of the Bright Young People. But two years after her arrival in London, tragedy strikes and she flees back to her childhood home and remains there for the rest of her life. As Betty navigates the ups and downs of city life and begins working as a nanny for a rock star tabloid magnet, her search for Clara leads her to a man—a stranger to Betty, but someone who meant the world to her grandmother. Will the secrets of Arlette’s past help Betty find her own way to happiness in the present? A rich detective story and a captivating look at London then and now, Before I Met You is an unforgettable novel about two very different women, separated by seventy years, but united by big hearts and even bigger dreams.

The most gripping marriage thriller since Gone Girl..

In the game of love you can't afford to drop the ball... Zoe’s always been shy. At college, to try to help her, her friend dares her to do the craziest thing she can think of… kiss a random guy. She follows Dylan into a room she thinks is a classroom and ends up seeing a little too much of him. She can hardly kiss him now… not when after their embarrassing encounter and certainly not after he tells her he has a girlfriend. But when he finds out about the dare, the two make a pact… if they ever cross paths again – and they’re both single – they’ll kiss. Two years later, fate intervenes, and they end up as accidental roommates. Now Zoe’s seeing a lot more of Dylan than she bargained for and it’s even harder to resist peeking the second time round.

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