David Nicholls is one of Britain’s most successful writers with an incomparable talent for making us laugh, cry and wince with recognition. It’s ten years since his novel One Day became an international publishing phenomenon and the iconic love story for a generation. It’s five years since the journey of Us took him to the Man Booker Prize long-list.

Ahead of the release of his much-anticipated new novel Sweet Sorrow, David will be interviewed live on stage at Storyhouse about his new novel. Included in the ticket price is an advance copy of the book, signed by the author, two days before its official release date.

Sweet Sorrow is the story of one life-changing summer for sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis. 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.

Poignant, funny, enchanting, devastating, Sweet Sorrow is a deeply evocative novel about negotiating the rocky path to adulthood, a hymn to the tragicomedy of family life, a celebration of the deep, reviving power of friendship and the brief, searing explosion of first love.

About David Nicholls
David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten, The Understudy, One Day and Us.  One Day was published in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim and became a no 1 Sunday Times bestseller, winning the 2010 Galaxy Book of the Year Award.  David was named Author of the Year at the 2014 National Book Awards after his fourth novel, Us, was another no 1 bestseller and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

David’s first screenwriting break came when he wrote for the third series of Cold Feet. Highlights since then have included adapting Far From the Madding Crowd and Great Expectations and his own first novels Starter for Ten and One Day into feature films. His most recent screenwork was Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, which he adapted from the novels by Edward St Aubyn.