The Rocks, Peter Nichols
The Rocks, Peter Nichols
1 Rating(s)
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
Club: $11.25

The Rocks

Author: Peter Nichols

Narrator: Steve West

Unabridged: 14 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 05/26/2015


Synopsis

“Irresistibly sunny…  Set in the brightly lit Mediterranean amid old olive trees and sexual intrigue, music and wine and beautiful women... Propulsive.” –The New York Times Book Review

“The perfect book for pretending it's already beach season.” –O, The Oprah Magazine

A romantic page-turner propelled by the sixty-year secret that has shaped two families, four lovers, and one seaside resort community.

Set against dramatic Mediterranean Sea views and lush olive groves, The Rocks opens with a confrontation and a secret: What was the mysterious, catastrophic event that drove two honeymooners apart so suddenly and absolutely in 1948 that they never spoke again despite living on the same island for sixty more years? And how did their history shape the Romeo and Juliet–like romance of their (unrelated) children decades later? Centered around a popular seaside resort club and its community, The Rocks is a double love story that begins with a mystery, then moves backward in time, era by era, to unravel what really happened decades earlier.

Peter Nichols writes with a pervading, soulful wisdom and self-knowing humor, and captures perfectly this world of glamorous, complicated, misbehaving types with all their sophisticated flaws and genuine longing. The result is a bittersweet, intelligent, and romantic novel about how powerful the perceived truth can be—as a bond, and as a barrier—even if it’s not really the whole story; and how one misunderstanding can echo irreparably through decades.

About The Author

Peter Nichols has worked in advertising and as a screenwriter, and a shepherd in Wales, and he has sailed alone across the Atlantic. He divides his time between Europe and the United States.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Wendy

Misogynistic. You can completely tell this book has been written by a man. All the female characters are these sex-crazed, aggressive, type-As, and the men just sit back and let all the bad stuff happen to them (all the ladies' faults of course). Ugh, couldn't stand this book.......more

2.5 stars If there was a Goodreads category "Best Novel With a 3.18 Rating Depicting People Behaving Badly on the Island of Mallorca", Peter Nichols' The Rocks would probably lose to Emma Straub's The Vacationers, even though Nichols' book is, arguably, better written. I feel like I'm dissing an au......more

Brits Gerald and Lulu were briefly married in 1948, and now, in 2005, both live in the same small Mallorcan village and pointedly avoid one another. Until one day, they don't. Words are exchanged, and they both tumble off a cliff to their deaths. The story then goes chronologically in reverse until......more


Quotes

Praise for The Rocks

“A wondrous novel. The Rocks is clearly the odyssey Peter Nichols was born to undertake.” —Richard Russo

“A Mediterranean idyll, a family saga, a mystery. A love story that’s as weird as real life, as rich and surprising and tender and affecting. The Rocks is all these things. Like Beautiful Ruins, it reminds me of all the reasons I read novels.”—Jennifer Haigh, Pen/Hemmingway Award-winning author of Faith