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Overview
In his fourth novel, New York Times-bestselling author Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line.
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.
In four distinct and riveting first-person voices, Nick Hornby tells a story of four individuals confronting the limits of choice, circumstance, and their own mortality. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.
Intense, hilarious, provocative, and moving, A Long Way Down is a novel about suicide that is, surprisingly, full of life.
Synopsis
The exhilarating New York Times bestseller from the author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How to Be Good.
The New York Times - Chris Heath
At its heart, A Long Way Down isn't really about suicide itself anyway. All four principal characters come down from the rooftop together and alive -- at least on that first evening. It's more about what happens when you don't kill yourself, and the tale Hornby subsequently tells is an unusual and unpredictable one. The book begins with an epigraph from the novelist Elizabeth McCracken -- ''The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don't care what anyone says'' -- but in what follows Hornby doesn't confuse the simplicity of this thought with the impossibility of sometimes living it. For all his light touches, he is never superficial enough to suggest that these lives that have fallen apart, in four of the millions of ways lives may do so, can easily be patched up and renewed. Whatever limited consolations the book's survivors find in each other, Hornby resists melodramatic resolutions or glorious moments of redemption, and he doesn't smuggle away or refute all the reasons his characters took with them to the rooftop where they met, the ones that urged them toward the edge rather than down to the ground the slow way, back into the world.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
"New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course ther'd be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date -- like March 28nd, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or November 25th (Nick Drake). If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless f*ck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant." Nick Hornby's predictably unpredictable fourth novel invites us to the roof of Topper's House, a traditional London suicide haunt. A Long Way Down is delivered through the distinctive voices of four would-be plungers.Chris Heath
At its heart, A Long Way Down isn't really about suicide itself anyway. All four principal characters come down from the rooftop together and alive -- at least on that first evening. It's more about what happens when you don't kill yourself, and the tale Hornby subsequently tells is an unusual and unpredictable one. The book begins with an epigraph from the novelist Elizabeth McCracken -- ''The cure for unhappiness is happiness, I don't care what anyone says'' -- but in what follows Hornby doesn't confuse the simplicity of this thought with the impossibility of sometimes living it. For all his light touches, he is never superficial enough to suggest that these lives that have fallen apart, in four of the millions of ways lives may do so, can easily be patched up and renewed. Whatever limited consolations the book's survivors find in each other, Hornby resists melodramatic resolutions or glorious moments of redemption, and he doesn't smuggle away or refute all the reasons his characters took with them to the rooftop where they met, the ones that urged them toward the edge rather than down to the ground the slow way, back into the world.— The New York Times