One Shakespearian summer
- Book: Sweet Sorrow
- Location: London, Sussex
- Author: David Nicholls
1997. It’s the end of the summer term, and the end of school for Charlie Lewis. He’s 16 and he knows he’s screwed up his exams. His schoolfriends are idiots. He lives with his Dad, depressed and unemployed, pill-popping and whisky-swilling since his record business went bust and Charlie’s Mum and sister walked out.
The future looks bleak.
Until Charlie meets Fran Fisher.
Fran introduces Charlie to ‘The Company’, an amateur dramatics group working through the summer towards a production of Romeo and Juliet. Joining in, and reluctantly playing Malvolio, is the price Charlie must pay to carry on seeing Juliet.
But despite himself, he comes to like these quirky, artistic people. And he comes to love Fran Fisher. Completely. Utterly. Hopelessly. At the same time as falling out with his old school mates, and coming to despise his feckless Dad.
For a moment, Fran helps Charlie to believe. But as summer fades, so does hope. Charlie messes up everything and although he helps his Dad to pick himself up from the floor, Charlie moves on and finds some sort of direction of his own in London.
20 years later, Charlie sees Fran again at a Company reunion. There is a frisson of excitement recalling that heady, romantic, sexual , Shakespearian summer in a small Sussex town. But can there still be any future together….?
David Nicholls has created a small contemporary masterpiece in ‘Sweet Sorrow‘. Funny, poignant, sad, tender and compassionate, this is a beautifully observed story of teenage angst, first love, a fractured family and friendship.
The observation of character is pitch-perfect, the story – deftly jumping between timelines – is heart-wrenching, and the language is exquisite. I hugged each page with a warm embrace, and finished the book with regret. And what better recommendation can there be than that?
For lovers of TripFiction, the Sussex setting may not be hugely evocative but the sense of a troubled boy growing up in a generic home counties town, and escaping to its rural fringes, is palpable.
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