Absolutely and Forever
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  • Published: 24 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529922509
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

Absolutely and Forever

Formats & editions
Paperback
24 Sep 2024
EBook
21 Sep 2023
Audiobook
21 Sep 2023
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How do you find the courage to make your own life? An electrifying novel about first love set in 1960s London and Paris from multiple bestseller, Rose Tremain

‘Gorgeous’ Observer * ‘Profoundly moving’ Financial Times * ‘Electrifying’ Daily Mail

How do you find the courage to make your own life? An electrifying novel about first love set in 1960s London from the bestselling Rose Tremain

Marianne is fifteen when she falls helplessly and absolutely in love with Simon. Simon owns a Morris Minor, is in his final year at school and has a dazzling future ahead of him. Desperate to escape the stifling 1950s suburbs she has been raised in, Marianne feels sure she will be able to find true happiness with him.

However a twist of fate sees Simon’s glittering future dashed and with it Marianne’s dreams. He flees the country and Marianne, realising she will now have to make a life of her own, moves to London determined to reinvent herself. But Marianne cannot let go of that first all-encompassing love and all the while Simon is in Paris, nursing a secret that will alter everything.

‘A perfect Tremain novel… English, dark and yearning… Remarkable… Tremain shows us the things that make every human life extraordinary’ The Times

‘A complex tale of becoming that’s moving, evocative and mesmerising in its acuity’ Mail on Sunday

A Sunday Times Book of the Year * Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction *

READERS LOVE ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER:

'Heartrending, funny, unputdownable' 5*****

'An undoubted modern classic' 5*****

'Marianne will remain with me as a friend' 5*****

'A masterclass in character and world building ... the writing is just sublime' 5*****

  • Published: 24 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529922509
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99
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About the author

Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country). Her most recent novel, The Gustav Sonata, was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. It won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

www.rosetremain.co.uk

portrait photo of Rose Tremain

Also by Rose Tremain

Iron Robin
Lily
Islands of Mercy
Rosie
Friendship
The Gustav Sonata
The American Lover
See all

Praise for Absolutely and Forever

There are only a handful of writers whose novels I read on publication day. Rose Tremain is one of them

John Boyne

PRAISE FOR ROSE TREMAIN: One of my favourite writers

Nina Stibbe

Tremain is one of the best novelists writing today

Sara Collins

Pulsatingly alive. . . no one can break your heart quite like this

Neel Mukherjee

Rose Tremain's fiction is my gold-standard

Charlotte Mendelson

PRAISE FOR ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER: 'Stunningly beautiful and deeply moving'

Simon Schama

Funny, piercing and singular… this gorgeous, pitch-perfect novel is a world unto itself… it’s powerful, too… I can’t fathom the reason why you wouldn’t rush straight out to buy it

Observer

A slim, funny, elegantly breezy coming-of-age story

Sunday Times

Rose Tremain… is back on form with Absolutely and Forever

Evening Standard

[A] delicate, generous-hearted novel

Spectator

This is a book about the comic, painful, life-long search for human understanding. Not a word is wasted; not a phrase trite. It is mesmerising, masterly and profoundly moving

Financial Times

A complex tale of becoming that’s moving, evocative and mesmerising in its acuity

Mail on Sunday

From page 4 of Absolutely and Forever we are swept back to the 1960s ... Skill and insouciance

TLS

An electrifying, word-perfect tale… Gently devastating, devastatingly beautiful

Daily Mail

Written with piercing clarity and gentle humour, Absolutely And Forever is a study of the messiness of human relationships, the significance of secrets unspoken and the impact of the choices we make

Independent

An engrossing character study ... But it is also a study in tolerance and kindness, and as such is more relevant to today’s reader than it might first seem

Guardian

A perfect Tremain novel… English, dark and yearning… remarkable… [Tremain shows] us the things that make every human life extraordinary

The Times

An electrifying, word-perfect tale ... [A] gently devastating, devastatingly beautiful novel

Irish Daily Mail

This is not the kind of book you would expect from an 80-year-old dame, but Rose Tremain has always surprised and delighted her readers…a slim, funny, elegantly breezy coming-of-age story… [and] Tremain’s most personal novel yet

Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*

[An] inspiring and important book

Daily Mail, *Books of the Year*

A brilliant evocation of growing up in the 1960s, which will ring true for those of us who lived through the period… Highly recommended

Lady
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