"Big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable." --Nick Hornby, from his blog

"[Nicholls] has a gift for zeitgeist description and emotional empathy that's wholly his own. . . . [A] light but surprisingly deep romance so thoroughly satisfying." --Entertainment Weekly

"Nicholls offers sharp dialogue and wry insight that sounds like Nick Hornby at his best." --The Daily Beast (A Best Book of the Summer)

"Fluid, expertly paced, highly observed, and at times, both funny and moving." --Boston Globe

"Those of us susceptible to nostalgic reveries of youthful heartache and self-invention (which is to say, all of us) longed to get our hands on Nicholls's new novel. . . . And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers." --New York Times Book Review

"Who doesn't relish a love story with the right amount of heart-melting romance, disappointment, regret, and huge doses of disenchantment about growing up and growing old between quarreling meant-to-be lovers?" --Elle, Top 10 Summer Books for 2010

"A great, funny, and heart-breaking read." --The Early Show [CBS]

"Funny, sweet and completely engrossing . . . The friendship at the heart of this novel is best expressed within the pitch-perfect dialogue/banter between the two." --Very Short List

"A wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad . . . the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up!. . . . Nicholls's witty prose has a transparency that brings Nick Hornby to mind: it melts as you read it so that you don't notice all the hard work that it's doing." --The Times (London)

"Just as Nicholls has made full use of his central concept, so he has drawn on all his comic and literary gifts to produce a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound." --The Guardian (London)