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Sign up todayTen Things I’ve Learnt about Love
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Learn moreAbout to turn thirty, Alice is the youngest of three daughters and the black sheep of her family. Drawn to traveling in far-flung and often dangerous countries, she has never enjoyed the closeness with her father that her two older sisters have and has eschewed their more conventional career paths. She has left behind a failed relationship in London with the man she thought she might marry and is late to hear the news that her father is dying. She returns to the family home only just in time to say good-bye.
Daniel is called many things—"tramp," "bum," "lost." He hasn't had a roof over his head for almost thirty years, but he once had a steady job and a passionate love affair with a woman he's never forgotten. To him, the city of London has come to be like home in a way that no bricks-and-mortar dwelling ever was. He makes sculptures out of the objects he finds on his walks throughout the city—bits of string and scraps of paper, a child's hair tie, and a lost earring—and experiences synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes him to see words and individual letters of the alphabet as colors. But as he approaches his sixties his health is faltering, and he is kept alive by the knowledge of one thing—that he has a daughter somewhere in the world whom he has never been able to find.
A searching and inventive debut, Ten Things I've Learnt About Love is a story about finding love in unexpected places, about rootlessness and homecoming, and the power of the ties that bind. It announces Sarah Butler as a major new talent for telling stories that are heart-wrenching, page-turning, and unforgettable.
Sarah Butler, author of Ten Things I’ve Learnt about Love, runs Urban Words, a consultancy which develops literature and arts projects that explore and question our relationship to place. She lives in London.
Susan Duerden is an actress and an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator. Her reading of The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht earned her an AudioFile Best Voice Award and a Booklist Editors’ Choice Award. She has won ten AudioFile Earphones Awards. Here career spans film, television, theater, voice-overs, and animation. She has played critically acclaimed and award-winning theatrical roles on London’s West End and Off Broadway; acted in the features Lovewrecked and Flushed Away; and held a recurring role on ABC’s Lost.
John Lee, is a stage actor, writer, and a coproducer of feature films. An AudioFile Golden Voice narrator, he is the winner of numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“If this weren’t billed as a debut novel, one would never know it. Sarah Butler writes with the deftness and delicacy of a master storyteller, giving us a compassionate, achingly beautiful rendering of a father and daughter.”
“Heartbreaking and hopeful, Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love crisscrosses London in a layered search for fathers and daughters, family and home. For anyone who has ever wondered where they belong, or to whom they belong—the answer can be found within Sarah Butler’s tender debut novel.
“Butler’s lists have a surprising emotional resonance. They represent her two narrators’ anguished and perhaps futile efforts to organize the sad and turbulent parts of life in an intrinsically chaotic city called London, circa right about now. And they are only the surface layer of a carefully structured story that invites and even requires puzzle-solving. This is a novel deeply committed to unfinishedness—the characters speak in sentences that trail off, plot points are left to be guessed at or pieced together. As a literary technique, the elliptical style is enormously effective, keeping the narrative in a constant, trembling state of tension, which gives the lists a grounding effect. This and the charming, gritty, and appropriately damp view of London nearly devoid of any Cool Britiannia elements make for a novel that often evokes strong feeling…There are a few things in this book that frustrate, but there are many more than ten to love.”
“Increasingly suspenseful…A moving and satisfying debut”
“This poignant novel about fathers and daughters, homecoming and restlessness, is also a love letter to London…Butler has viewed the city in all its weathers and moods, and this shines through on every page. Equally elegant are her observations of the emotional turmoil of her main characters as they pace the capital’s highways and byways, united by a secret…A moving, life-affirming debut.”
“Graceful and subtle…Butler writes Daniel and his situation exceptionally well; neither romanticizing nor patronizing…This is a thought—as well as emotion—provoking novel. Butler coaxes her readers into different points of view, switching perspectives to explore the pull of travelling, how far it’s about living, how far running away; whether it can, sometimes, be better to leave truths untold. It also sparkles with hope.”
“This soulful debut unpacks a family enigma involving a wandering daughter, a homeless father and their tenuous family ties…Spare language and an atmosphere of foreboding will keep readers on tenterhooks. Whimsy and pathos, artfully melded.”
“Butler’s elegant prose makes this a moving debut.”
“Butler’s poignant first novel has a distinct sense of place and sympathetic characters who have much in common.”
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