Can you define your life by a single song? Adam Sharp - former pianist in a hip Melbourne bar, now a respectable IT consultant in Norwich - can. And it's 'You're Going to Lose that Girl' . . .
On the cusp of fifty and a happy introvert, Adam is content. He's the music expert at his local pub-quiz and he and his partner Claire rumble along. Life may not be rock n' roll, but neither is it easy listening. Yet something has always felt off-key.
And that's his nostalgia for what might have been, his blazing affair - more than twenty years ago, on the other side of the world - with Angelina Brown, a smart and sexy, strong-willed actress who taught him for the first time, as he played piano and she sang, what it meant to find - and then lose - love. How different might his life be if he hadn't let her walk away?
Then, out of nowhere, Angelina gets in touch. Adam has sung about second chances, but does he have the courage to believe in them?
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[f my life prior to 15 February 2012 had been a song, it might have been 'Hey Jude', a simple piano tune, taking my sad and sorry adolescence and making it better]***
(Michael Joseph, 9 February 2017, copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is my first time reading the author.
I enjoyed The Best of Adam Sharp. It was a funny, warm, emotional and nostalgic novel.
I'm the kind of person who associates particular songs with important moments in my life. The links are not necessary because a particular song was playing when a particular event happened but more because lyrics resonate specific emotions. I loved all the musical references in the book and how Adam links them to his memories of Angelina.
I did enjoy the book and found it light and frothy if a little lacking.
I didn't particularly like any of the characters. Adam, as the main characters comes across as pretty shallow at times, being cold and dismissive to his partner of many years while obsessing over an old lover from twenty years before. Claire was more tolerant of his coldness than I would have been. Also when he gets to spend time with Angelina and her husband Chris they become a weird ménage a trois which was uncomfortable at times.
The Best of Adam Sharp is a fun read but rather empty underneath it all.
