The Notebook

by Nicholas Sparks

Published 1997

In a nursing home on the North Carolina coast, an old man sits beside a woman whose memory is slipping, opens a worn notebook, and reads to her the story of two young people who met one summer in the 1940s. Noah, a working-class boy from a small mill town, and Allie, the daughter of a wealthy visiting family, fall into a fierce, impractical romance cut short by distance, war, and the expectations pressed upon them. Years later, when Allie's engagement notice appears in the paper, she finds herself pulled back toward a choice she thought she had already made. Nicholas Sparks's 1996 debut novel, his first published work of fiction, became one of the defining modern love stories and the launching point of a career that has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. Sentimental, plainspoken, and unafraid of its own earnestness, The Notebook moves between the couple's youth and their old age to ask what endurance really looks like in a relationship and what it means to love someone when they no longer know your name.