One life-changing summer sixteen-year-old Charlie meets Fran... Charlie is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph. As the summer stretches before him, his exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way around, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and although it’s unthinkable, Charlie, despite himself, begins to hope. But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must accept a challenge that will lose him the respect of his friends and almost require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling: the price of hope, it seems, is Shakespeare. 8 million copies since STARTER FOR TEN first introduced us to his incomparable talent for making us laugh, cry and wince with recognition in the space of a single sentence; ten years after ONE DAY became the iconic love story for a generation; five years since the journey of US took him to the Man Booker Prize long-list; DAVID NICHOLLS has written a major new novel, SWEET SORROW: a hymn to the tragicomedy of ordinary lives, a celebration of the reviving power of friendship and that brief, blinding explosion of first love that perhaps can only be looked at directly once it has burned out. PRAISE FOR DAVID NICHOLLS: “Nicholls writes with such tender precision about love.” THE TIMES “There is a sharp empathetic intelligence to his writing that makes his characters real…the clear writing often dazzles with truth…sad funny, soulful.” OBSERVER “A sublime talent for illuminating the murky causeway that most of us have to navigate between darkness and light.” DONAL RYAN “Nicholls' ability to create and then subvert the traditional plot for comedy is the secret of his success. It makes us confront the gap between what we expect from storytelling and what happens in real life.” SPECTATOR