Adrienne Willis is 45 and has been divorced for three years, abandoned by her husband for a younger woman. The trials of raising her teenage children and caring for her sick father have worn her down, but at the request of a friend and in hopes of respite, she's gone to the coastal village of Rodanthe in North Carolina to tend the local inn for the weekend. With a major storm brewing, the time away doesn't look promising...until a guest named Paul Flanner arrives. At 54, Paul is a successful surgeon, but in the previous six months his life has unraveled into something he doesn't recognize. Estranged from his son and recently divorced, he's sold his practice and his home and has journeyed to this isolated town in hopes of closing a painful chapter in his past. Adrienne and Paul come together as the storm brews over Rodanthe, but what begins between them over the weekend will resonate throughout the rest of their lives, intertwining past and future, love and loss.
COMING SOON AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE starring Richard Gere and Diane Lane.
Sparks (A Bend in the Road, etc.) logs more miles on the winding high road of romance with the story of two middle-aged people who meet by chance in the small North Carolina coastal town of Rodanthe. The impassioned but doomed romance seems to owe much to Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. Once again, a housewife who has focused on everyone but herself indulges in a brief, intense, secret affair with a stranger who changes her life forever. As the story begins, Adrienne Willis is 60, the divorced mother of three grown children. To help her troubled daughter cope with the untimely recent death of her husband, Adrienne tells her the tale of her love affair, which took place 15 years before. At the time, Adrienne was an uptight matron whose ex-husband had just left her for a younger woman. This rejection colors her entire life, and Sparks realistically portrays a vulnerable and isolated woman who throws herself into raising her children to escape her despair. Paul Flanner, her paramour, is a surgeon and an obsessive workaholic with no genuine connection to his wife or son, whose world completely falls apart when one of his patients inexplicably dies. Sparks builds a taut, plausible relationship between his protagonists, but even fans may be irked by the obviousness of their story and the inevitability of their fate. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Nicholas Charles Sparks was born in Omaha, Nebraska on December 31, 1965, the second son of Patrick Michael (1942-1996) and Jill Emma Marie (Thoene) Sparks (1942-1989). His siblings are Michael Earl Sparks (b. Dec. 1964), and Danielle Sparks (b. Dec. 1966, d. June, 2000). As a child, he lived in Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Grand Island, Nebraska, finally settling in Fair Oaks, California at the age of eight. His father was a professor, his mother a homemaker, then optometrist's assistant. He lived in Fair Oaks through high school, graduated valedictorian in 1984, and received a full track scholarship to the University of Notre Dame. After breaking the Notre Dame school record as part of a relay team in 1985 as a freshman (a record which still stands), he was injured and spent the summer recovering. During that summer, he wrote his first novel, though it was never published. He majored in Business Finance and graduated with high honors in 1988. He and his wife Catherine, who met on spring break in 1988, were married in July, 1989. While living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel that same year, though again, it wasn't published. He worked a variety of jobs over the next three years, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone, and started his own small manufacturing business which struggled from the beginning. In 1990, he collaborated on a book with Billy Mills, the Olympic Gold Medalist and it was published by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. (It was recently re-issued by Hay House Books.) Though it received scant publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release. He began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, California to North Carolina in 1992. In 1994, at the age of 28, he wrote The Notebook over a period of six months. In October, 1995, rights to The Notebook were sold to Warner Books. It was published in October, 1996, and he followed that with Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), and Nights in Rodanthe (2002), The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks with my Brother (2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005) all with Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers and were translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of Message in a Bottle was released in 1999, A Walk to Remember was released in 2002, and The Notebook was released in 2004. The average domestic box office gross per film was $56 million -- with another $100 million in DVD sales -- making the novels by Nicholas Sparks one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood. The film rights to Nights in Rodanthe, True Believer and At First Sight have been sold, and Nicholas Sparks has written the screenplay for The Guardian, though he has not offered it for sale at this point. He now has five children: Miles, Ryan, Landon, Lexie, and Savannah. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and children. His ancestry is German, Czech, English, and Irish, he's 5'10" and weighs 180 lbs. He is an avid athlete who runs daily, lifts weights regularly, and competes in Tae Kwon Do. He attends church regularly and reads approximately 125 books a year. He contributes to a variety of local and national charities, and is a major contributor to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame, where he provides scholarships, internships, and a fellowship annually.
At age sixty, Adrienne Willis is faced with the fact that her daughter Amanda has been unable to regain her emotional equilibrium after her husband died of cancer. Adrienne becomes increasingly worried about the impact on Amanda's two young sons. Amanda rejects her mother's attempts to lend support, since she believes that her divorced mother does not "know what it is like to live through something like " the death of a loved one. Adrienne decides that Amanda needs to learn about a part of her mother's life that has been kept secret from her family, and as she reviews the items she has saved from her NIGHTS IN RODANTHE and as she rereads the letter from Paul (Flanner), by the end of the first chapter not only has the complete plot been revealed but we guess the conclusion in a general way.
Thus, the attraction of this story is its simplicity and spareness as the author gives us enough details to fulfill our curiosity but makes no attempt to embellish it beyond the necessary minimum. In a flashback to fifteen years ago, Adrienne agees to watch a coastal inn for a friend who has to attend a wedding. Because it is past the tourist season and a hurricane is forecast, Paul Flanner (a very successful surgeon who has just sold his practice to go to Ecuador to be with his son) is the only guest. They are both attempting to recover from failed marriages, and their few brief nights together become a life changing experience for each of them. This is the eternal story of our search to instill meaning into our lives, and the question of what constitutes real love.
I have read none of Nicholas Sparks' other books or THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, but did see the movie MEASSAGE IN A BOTTLE. My only response to the critics of this book who compare it to those other works is that their disappointment seems to be based on their expectations, rather than on an evaluation of what the author was attempting to do with this story. In fact, I WAS GLAD THAT AN AUTHOR HAS DECIDED FOR ONCE THAT LESS CAN BE MORE, and the essence of a really good and compelling story about human emotions can be strong enough to stand on its own without a lot of embellishment. I believe that this story succeeds in fulfilling that goal, and therefore while I understand the very disparate reviews which it has received I strongly recommend it for those readers interested in what it purports to be, a story of life and rembrance of the healing power of love, even when fate has intervened to make those recollections bittersweet.
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I just finished reading Nicholas Sparks latest creation "Nights in Rodanthe". Let me tell you...run do not walk to the store to purchase this one. I have read every single one of Sparks novels thus far. He writes like no other. His imagery is fantastic....as you are reading it is like a movie unfolding before your eyes. I will not outline the story for you here because I think that ruins it for the reader. Expect to cry (as usual). But expect to learn something and also to reflect on your own life as well. I think that is what I love most about Sparks is that everything is "real". You can relate by having experienced similar things or by knowing someone who has. I just wish he could write faster because as soon as one of his novels is released, I read it the same day...and then am stuck waiting, craving for the next one. I also highly recommend Message in a Bottle and The Rescue.
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Another love story by the author of MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE and other tragedy-laden romances, NIGHTS IN RODANTHE recalls an older woman's memories of a love lost, but not forgotten.
Adrienne Willis is 60 years old and is trying to help her daughter Amanda deal with the recent death of her young husband. Amanda does not seem to be able to cope with the death, ignoring her young children's needs and falling apart before them all. Adrienne decides to tell Amanda the story of a man she loved many years ago, but due to circumstances that kept them apart, they did not have a "happily ever after". She hopes that this story will help Amanda with her own loss.
Fourteen years ago, three years after Adrienne's husband Jack had left her for another woman, Adrienne honors a request to help take care of a friend's Bed and Breakfast Inn while her friend goes away on vacation. Adrienne has yet to move on with her life since the divorce, and time spent at the Inn may be what Adrienne needs. There is only one guest that weekend, and it is Paul Flanner, a surgeon who is going through his own nightmare of a past, and happens to stay at the Inn while he conducts some business in town.
Adrienne and Paul connect and as they get to know each other, they fall in love. Paul, however, has already committed to spending time in South America and be with his son, who also happened to be a doctor. He tells Adrienne that as soon as his work is done there, he will come back for her and they would have plenty of time to be together.
Obviously, things did not work out for Adrienne and Paul, since Adrienne was sitting in her kitchen with her recently widowed daughter. What happens after that week in Rodanthe is Adrienne's story to her daughter, and what Amanda learns from her mother helps bring her back to the world of the living.
This was yet another heartbreaking story by Nicholas Sparks and I highly enjoyed it. I have read all of his books, and I still come back for more. What I find interesting is that people he knows inspire him to write most of his books, and this book was no exception. Inspired by his own courtship with his wife, Sparks yet again has written a winning book.
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