Product Description

The perfect book to curl up with on a long winter's evening. Rich, witty and moving I Remember You is for anyone who likes to dream about a new life -- and for anyone who still remembers their first love. Heartbroken Tess Tennant is leaving London and moving back to her picture-perfect home town to take up a teaching job. It's time for a fresh start, one with warm stone cottages, friendly locals in oak-beamed pubs and of course Adam, her best friend since childhood. But something isn't right in the town: Adam is preoccupied with a new girlfriend and the past is looming large again. So by the time she has to take her class on a trip to Rome, Tess is feeling reckless. Swept off her feet by a mysterious stranger, she finds herself falling in love. But her magical Roman Holiday is about to turn into a nightmare! Back in Langford, as autumn creeps towards Christmas, Adam is gone and everything has changed.Tess has to decide, once and for all, where she belongs and who with.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2149 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 504 pages

Review
Praise for I Remember You: 'I Remember You ! is the perfect girly read' Cosmopolitan 'A fabulous feel-good love story of friendship lost and love regained' Woman & Home 'Very touching, warm and sweet' Heat '!a moving and witty story of love, friendship and self-discovery, this is a great read for those cosy nights in' Closer Praise for Harriet Evans: 'Will warm you up like a brandy on a winter's night!witty, entertaining, self-reflective and full of characters you'll grow to love' Heat 'Enchanting' Jilly Cooper 'Fabulous!I loved it' Sophie Kinsella A joy from start to finish -- sharp, funny and modern as well as warm, cuddly and nostalgic' Fiona Walker. A lovely, funny heart-warmer!Evans' heightened comic style and loveable characters make it effortlessly readable' Marie Claire 'Events and characters fairly leap off the page in this touching, engrossing and convincing novel. It's a rollicking ride of joy, disappointment and self-discovery, which you'll want to devour in one sitting' Daily Telegraph

About the Author
Harriet Evans is the author of three previous novels, Going Home, A Hopeless Romantic and The Love of Her Life, all of which were bestsellers. She lives in London and now writes full time, having given up her job this year to do so.

Customer Reviews

Another winner
Happiness is a free afternoon, a box of rose and violet creams from Hope and Greenwood, and a fat new novel from my favourite author. One of the real pleasures of this book is that as well as the romance and humour you expect of Harriet Evans, I Remember You is also a charming education in the city and history of Rome. It's all lightly done and effortlessly woven into the narrative, but I came away feeling I'd really learned something - and longing to go to Rome myself. Tess Tennant has left London for a new life in her childhood village of Langford (think Cranford - all doilies and tourists and rustic bliss), where she's taken up a new post as Classical Civilization tutor at the local adult education college. While Tess captivates her students with stories of ancient Rome, she struggles to settle back into country life, where everyone in the local pub knows exactly what you have, or haven't, been up to. Thank goodness for Adam, the local lothario, and her oldest friend. By the time Tess's course culminates in a week in Rome, she's in need of an escape from her middle-aged students, and she finds one in a passionate affair. But she has to go home in the end and, when she does, old secrets have begun to unravel, drawing her far away from her Roman holiday and back into her Langford past. Clear your diary and prepare to devour this in one sitting.

Pure escapism.....better than chocolate!!!!
Don't you just love a book that you can't put down, with characters that you can relate to and feel so involved with that you miss them when its all over? I am delighted that I found Harriet Evans and now can't wait to go and read her other books. BRILLIANT!

Utterly unmemorable
Having really enjoyed Harriet Evans' three previous novels, I was extremely excited to discover this had been published. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed. In 'The Love of Her Life', I'd already noticed that she seemed to be leaning towards more traditionally dramatic plots, rather than focusing on everyday life interspersed with unrealistic but fun romance, as in her first two books. I'd also begun to note that each book combined two slightly incompatible elements; the heroine's slightly offbeat existence as a working girl in London, and her escape to rural idylls and/or family problems, which never read quite as realistically as the 'London life' sections. In this novel, both these tendencies come together, with horribly cliched results.

The sub-plot - which occasionally dominates the novel - is a traditional family-saga type revelation which is incredibly easy to guess. In the very first pages, excluding the prologue, we are introduced to Leonora, a bitter and twisted old woman who (surprise!) has her reasons for being bitter and twisted. Occasionally over the plodding course of the novel we come back to Leonora and her woes, but this opening, and the following interludes, drag down the novel from the start. Already overlong, it's not helped by extensive descriptions of the hopelessly twee invented village where it's set - and a bizarrely pointless sub-sub-plot about some water meadows being bulldozed (the exact details may have escaped me here - I'm afraid, by that time, I had lost interest).

And when we finally seem to hit the main plot, which centres around thirty-year-old Tess, her romantic struggles, and her complicated relationship with her long-time best friend Adam, the pace still doesn't pick up. Even Tess's trip to Rome fails to enliven things (although at least the background detail begins to feel genuinely observed, rather than plucked from a cookie-cutter set of details about village life). Tess herself doesn't help matters; I found her increasingly irritating, as she was too passive to make any sort of attempt at sorting out the problems in her life, even when the answers seemed obvious. Instead, she prefers to bury herself in her cottage and eat biscuits, which doesn't make for interesting reading. As a previous reviewer has noted, her housemate Francesca (and even she is borrowed from a previous book) adds the only bit of spark to the proceedings, and when she departs about halfway through the novel, it only sags further.

To give this book the benefit of the doubt, I should note that it focused on all the elements of Harriet Evans' previous novels that I disliked most (though with an extra helping of sugariness). I was always more interested in reading about her heroines' real lives than their fantasy escapes (Lizzy to Keeper House, Laura on her National Trust holiday, Kate to New York), and unfortunately, Tess spends this entire book in a fantasy. This may therefore appeal to you if you enjoyed the escapism sections of her previous novels more. Even so, though, it's simply not as well-written as my favourite 'A Hopeless Romantic', which is delightfully tongue-in-cheek about its embroiderings on reality, or even as 'Going Home', which at least managed to make Keeper House seem like a real place. Purchase with caution.