A Working Theory of Love
  • Published: 24 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241962558
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

A Working Theory of Love

Formats & editions
EBook
24 Apr 2013
Paperback
11 Apr 2014
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The debut from the American Nick Hornby, picked by Publishers Weekly in their top ten novels of the autumn, along side JK Rowling and Ian McEwan

Neill has got a lot to learn...

Since his 'starter' marriage dissolved a couple of years ago, thirty-two year-old Neill Bassett has been learning how to be single again. Now he's learning the skills and routines that long-term bachelorhood requires - how to be less spontaneous, how not to feel too much, how to eat standing up.

Since starting work at a Silicon Valley software company, meanwhile, Neill has been teaching a computer how to be human. By 'conversing' every day with a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence, his job is to help it seem more spontaneous, more emotionally convincing, more alive.
The catch is that the AI programme is based on a real person, Neill's dead father. If he brings him back to life, he might end up learning more than he bargained for...

The other catch is that, despite his best efforts, a good thing has dropped into his life, unmerited and unanticipated, and thrown everything out of kilter. Her name is Rachel. For her sake, if not for his own, Neill might have to learn how to be a proper person after all...

Set in contemporary San Francisco, where anything goes (and regularly does), this recklessly witty, formidably funny, outrageously honest novel captures the exquisite agony of the most important relationships of our twenty-first century lives - across the generations and between the sexes. And also with computers that talk.
  • Published: 24 April 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241962558
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336
Categories:

Praise for A Working Theory of Love

Electrifying. Clever, funny and very entertaining

The New York Times

Tremendous, big, clever ... Every once in a while a novel comes along and speaks to a generation ... Hutchins expertly charts the terrain of love, and what it means to fall, and fall hard

Guardian

'Touching and extremely funny, Neill Bassett is a disenchanted bachelor for the Noughties generation. Brilliantly achieved

GQ

Likened to the work of Nick Hornby ... humorous and quietly profound

Observer

Worthy of Chuck Palahniuk ... Hutchins's satirical take on 21st-century existence is sharply observed

Independent

Smart, breezy, an assured debut ... Mixing the everyman likeability of Nick Hornby with a splash of the offbeat intellect of Douglas Coupland

Metro

Zeitgeisty, poignant and funny

The Herald

Inventive, intelligent and sometimes hilarious. One of the pleasures here is Hutchins' terrific grasp of the zeitgest

San Francisco Chronicle

A brainy, bright, laughter-through-tears, can't-stop-reading-until-it's-over kind of novel

Gary Shteyngart

Terrific. Throughout, Hutchins hits that sweet spot where humour and melancholy comfortably coexist

Entertainment Weekly

Original, wise, full of serious thinking, serious fun and the shock of the new. Astonishing

Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son

Terrific. And intriguing, original take on family and friendship, lust and longing, grief and forgiveness

Associated Press

Wonderful. Brilliantly observant about the way we live now. Comic and haunting

Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

Beautifully written and consistently engaging. Charming, warm-hearted and thought-provoking

The New York Times

Inventive and engaging

New Yorker
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