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.
'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
Author
About Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life.'
His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], minutely analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction. It's a book of which many readers are still fondest.
