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A Novel
by Jessica Soffer
An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both.
For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.
Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn't always want to know—the determined young student of Abe's looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.
An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.
"Soffer's writing is simple yet poetic. Most impressive is her ability to capture the depths of emotions of all her characters while rooting readers in such a strong sense of place…A New York love story at its finest." —Library Journal
"It's an ode to a marriage, but also to Central Park itself." —Town & Country
"Written with delicate and beautiful brush strokes, this is a love story of a long marriage, a love story of Central Park, a story of how hard life can be, and how the hard leaves its mark, but the love does too. Every once in a while I read a novel and think, What a gift. This is one of those books." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward
"This Is A Love Story is Jessica Soffer's iridescent, kaleidoscopic, homerun of a novel. It's a beautiful book of seasons, marking the cycles of a city, a family, the creative process, and a single and singular life." —Nathan Englander, New York Times bestselling author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth
"This Is A Love Story is a revelation—the kind of novel to read in one sitting. It performs the magic trick of being a highly specific story that feels universal and timeless. When you finish, you'll find that your worldview has been gently and deftly altered by an author whose tenderness toward her characters—and toward language itself—is unparalleled." —Liz Moore, bestselling author of Long Bright River and The God of the Woods
This information about This Is a Love Story was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jessica Soffer is the author of This Is a Love Story and Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots. She grew up in New York City, attended Connecticut College, and earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Real Simple, Saveur, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and on NPR's Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space and lives in Sag Harbor, New York, with her family.
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