The Big Love: A Novel [Hardcover]

Sarah Dunn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2004

Sometimes being left in the lurch is the best thing that can happen to you.Alison Hopkins's live-in boyfriend, Tom, goes out in the middle of a dinner party to buy a jar of mustard, then calls her from a pay phone to tell her he won't be coming home. He's left her for his beautiful ex-girlfriend Kate Pearce, the kind of woman about whom men say rhapsodically, 'She's like a drug.'Alison had always feared that Tom's looks would land her in trouble-having a handsome boyfriend is like having a white couch, an invitation to disaster. But if Tom isn't her Big Love, who is? Alison embraces her freedom, buys 'hiking boots and lacy underwear,' and sets out on a stroll down the midway of love. From an eye-opening fling with her new boss to an unexpected proposal from an old friend, Alison samples love's many varieties-all the while talking obsessively with her girlfriends, comparing stories, and working through a lifetime of conflicting beliefs about trust, faith, and commitment.In spite of (or perhaps because of) her neuroses, Alison finds a surprising kind of triumph-and an irrational faith that the Big Love may be nearer than it appears.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The annals of love have recorded many a humiliating breakup over the years, but Alison Hopkins gets hit with a humdinger in this surprising, touching and hilariously deadpan debut novel. When she sends her live-in boyfriend Tom to the supermarket right before a dinner party, she figures the worst that can happen is that he'll get the wrong mustard. Instead he calls from a pay phone to tell her he's not coming back at all, because he's fallen in love with his college sweetheart, Kate Pearce—with whom he's been sleeping for five months. If Alison were a Sex and the City siren, she'd distract herself with martinis, Manolos and misappropriated men, but she's a broke columnist for the floundering weekly The Philadelphia Times. Plus, though now lapsed, she was raised evangelist Christian. So it's a new pair of hiking boots, pie-contest judging and furtive dalliances with a coworker for reluctant good-girl Alison as she tries to gauge the ins and outs of the single world that non-fundamentalists mastered in their early 20s. Alison's struggles to fit into the mainstream world are fresh and full of wisdom, and Dunn's humor is marvelously dry: "Bonnie had a sudden flash of what he might come up with on his own…so she drew a picture on a cocktail napkin of a wide band of channel-set diamonds, and she wrote down the words 'platinum' and 'size six' and 'BIG' and 'SOON.' " This is a delightful exploration of the empowerment that comes from escaping a Big Love turned Bad Love.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Alison Hopkins is devastated when her live-in boyfriend, Tom, walks out of their dinner party and back into the arms of his ex-girlfriend, Kate. Tom is only 33-year-old Alison's second lover, and she wonders if she wouldn't be better off if she had slept with more men. So when Henry, her handsome new boss at the free daily Philadelphia paper for which she writes a relationship column, seems interested in her, Alison seizes the opportunity. However, being a carefree girl-about-town isn't as easy as Alison thought, and she soon finds herself in Henry's office asking him about the state of their relationship. Alison's friend Nina promises Tom will come crawling back to her, but is that really what she wants? Musing on everything from her evangelical Christian upbringing to men behaving badly (and just how long this stage lasts), Alison's engaging voice carries this thoughtful, introspective, smart novel along and raises it far above the average novel about a young woman looking for love in the big city. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; First Edition edition (July 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316738158
• ISBN-13: 978-0316738156
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (79 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #902,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Chick Lit, July 11, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Big Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

While I love reading "single thirtysomething women in the big city books" the genre has been SO overdone.
As a result you get books that are trying to hard to be witty ( most recently, Bergdorf Blondes) or poorly written (most recently, Bergdorf Blondes).

Big Love is a refreshing change - the writing is smooth and seamless, the story is engaging (unlike The Devil Wears Prada), and it is laugh out loud funny.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Big Waste, No Love, June 6, 2005

By 

D. Parham "deelovesmusic" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Big Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

Was this book supposed to be humorous? I did not laugh one time, and the neurotic nature of the main character was not different than other chick lit characters that I have read before. After reading the glowing reviews, I really wanted to love this book, but somehow it just fell short. Allison was a likeable character, but her constant dialogue about her childhood religion and sex got really boring after awhile. I kept looking for some redeeming quality about this novel, but it continued to fall short of expectations. Also, do chick lit heroines ever do anything beside be a) novelists or b) columnists for local/alternative newspapers? Author alert- it is just plain lazy to think that every character is Carrie Bradshaw- that is the easy way out. Write more original characters- it might actually add some much needed character dimension.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful read, August 18, 2004

By 

C. E. - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Love: A Novel (Hardcover)

From the first chapter, this book has you curious about this just dumped, former fundamentalist Christian woman who has only slept with two men in her life - one of them gay. Talk about a multi-faceted character. I'm not usually a big fan of lots of exposition, and this book has more exposition than dialog, lots more, but it works.