A Forty Year Kiss: A Novel

Summary

I STILL DREAM ABOUT YOU

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn’t quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he’s not sure what he’ll find. He is sure of one thing—he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past. But forty years is a long time. It’s forty years of other relationships, forty years of building new lives, and forty years of long-held regrets, mistakes, and painful secrets.

An accomplished exploration of starting over and sunset triumph, A Forty Year Kiss is a novel in the tradition of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night. This is a literary valentine that promises to become a love story for the ages.

“Thank you, Nickolas Butler, for writing a love story that feels so powerfully real, a story that captures the hope, grace, and joy of new love—but also the mistakes, scar tissue, and regret of past love. It’s a wonder to behold, a novel capable of such breadth. This is the kind of book that makes me a better human.”—Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness