Novel of the week

Hodder & Stoughton 416pp £20

The Week bookshop £16.99

Before taking up fiction-writing, David Nicholls – author of the smash hit One Day – was an unsuccessful actor, said Alfred Hickling in The Guardian. It’s still possible to detect a “lingering sense of thwarted theatrical ambition” in his work.

Sweet Sorrow, his latest novel, is set over the “long hot summer of 1997” and centres on an am-dram production of Romeo and Juliet. Playing Benvolio is 16-year-old comprehensive school leaver Charlie Lewis. Uninterested in either acting or Shakespeare, he has agreed to the role purely to spend time with the “beguiling” Juliet, Fran Fisher. From Charlie’s retrospective account, it’s clear their romance was “never destined to last”. This is a “funny, affectionate” account of first love that “resists the temptation to become overly sentimental”.

Sweet Sorrow is an “odd-couple romantic comedy”, said David Annand in the FT. Charlie’s home life is “chaotic”: his parents have just divorced, and he lives with his “depressed” dad. By contrast, the Fisher family are posh, with their “fresh herbs and wine at dinner”. Nicholls writes well about “minor-key class signifiers”, and the novel “skips along merrily” with sparkling repartee and genuinely funny jokes. Nonetheless, there’s a sense here of Nicholls being on autopilot. Isn’t it time for him to “move on from the romcom”? Absolutely not, said Alex Preston in The Observer: the romcom is what Nicholls “does best”. Mixing heartbreak with “laugh-out-loud” comedy, he plunges his readers into a “nostalgic memory-scape”. Once again, he has pulled off that “most rare and coveted of literary feats”: a popular novel that will also endure.