> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 3 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241962138
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

The Course of Love

An unforgettable story of love and marriage from the author of bestselling novel Essays in Love




A brilliant new novel about love and marriage, twenty years after the bestselling hit Essays in Love

Modern love is never easy. Society is obsessed with stories of romance, but what comes after happily ever after?

This is a love story with a difference. From dating to marriage, from having kids to having affairs, it follows the progress of a single ordinary relationship: tender, messy, hilarious, painful, and entirely un-Romantic. It is a love story for the modern world, chronicling the daily intimacies, the blazing rows, the endless tiny gestures that make up a life shared between two people. Moving and deeply insightful, The Course of Love offers us a window into essential truths about the nature of love.

  • Published: 3 January 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241962138
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.' He's written on love, travel, architecture and literature. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries.

 

Alain also started and helps to run a school in London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new vision of education. 

Also by Alain de Botton

See all

Praise for The Course of Love

Publisher's description. Rabih and Kirsten meet, fall in love, get married. Think this is the end of the story? It's only the beginning. With his trademark warmth and wit, Alain de Botton explores modern relationships with a novel that asks what it truly means to love and to be loved.

Penguin

He's completely on the money with the minutiae of marital life and every note rings uncomfortably true. The story is told with great wit and affection... de Botton knows his stuff and the book builds into a truly wonderful and positive analysis of a successful lifelong partnership. It should be compulsory reading for anyone contemplating tying the knot.

Daily Mail

Engaging, meticulous, acutely perceptive... There's a refreshing honesty in what De Botton has to say

Guardian

One passage was so spot-on that I read it aloud to my husband... De Botton appreciates, as few writers do, the miracle and subtlety of the so-called ordinary

The Times

Well-observed and imbued with a tenderness that feels authentic and uncynical... It may even save some marriages.

Evening Standard

[A] worldly wise romance

Mail on Sunday

A complete delight

Amy Bloom, author of 'Lucky us'