The End of Loneliness

Publisher's Summary

From internationally best-selling author Benedict Wells, a sweeping novel of love and loss and of the lives we never get to live.

"[D]azzling storytelling...The End of Loneliness is both affecting and accomplished - and eternal." (John Irving)

Jules Moreau’s childhood is shattered after the sudden death of his parents. Enrolled in boarding school where he and his siblings, Marty and Liz, are forced to live apart, the once vivacious and fearless Jules retreats inward, preferring to live within his memories - until he meets Alva, a kindred soul caught in her own grief. Fifteen years pass, and the siblings remain strangers to one another, bound by tragedy and struggling to recover the family they once were. Jules, still adrift, is anchored only by his desires to be a writer and to reunite with Alva, who turned her back on their friendship on the precipice of it becoming more. But, just as it seems they can make amends for time wasted, invisible forces - whether fate or chance - intervene.              

A kaleidoscopic family saga told through the fractured lives of the three Moreau siblings, alongside a faltering, recovering love story, The End of Loneliness is a stunning meditation on the power of our memories, of what can be lost and what can never be let go. With inimitable compassion and luminous, affecting prose, Benedict Wells contends with what it means to find a way through life, while never giving up hope you will find someone to go with you. 

©2018 Benedict Wells (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic Reviews

“Like John Boyne, Wally Lamb or John Irving, Benedict Wells has conjured a fictional world - at once epic and intimate, full of uncanny occurrences, inescapable fates, love lost and found and lost again - that quickly becomes more vivid to the reader than the real world that exists beyond its covers. Even a great book might not actually put an end to loneliness, but I can’t imagine a better salve for solitude than a novel like this, a book with the empathy, bravery, and vision to venture straight into the turbulent, vivid, interior landscapes of memory in order to reveal to us our own innermost selves.” (Stefan Merrill Block, author of Oliver Loving and The Story of Forgetting)

“Touching and timeless, [The End of Loneliness] is expertly and evocatively rendered, in prose both beautiful and sparse enough to cut clearly to the question at the novel’s heart: how one copes with loss that isn’t - or doesn’t have to be - permanent.” (Publishers Weekly)

“A life-affirming work.” (Vogue)

“A love story and a life story, this rich and well-translated domestic drama acknowledges that some bonds are truly immutable in the face of, or perhaps because of, tragedy and that our memories and the stories we make of them, though they may change, are as real as anything.” (Booklist, starred review)

A pretty good read.

I was fooled by the black and white cover thinking this book would be more “artistic” than it was. It was okay but I don’t really understand how the title relates to the story. All relationships can end resulting in loneliness. I just didn’t get it.

Bravo!

Outstanding narration of this thought provoking, exciting book! This is a must listen experience, the story was so detailed that I could see every character and imagine each scene.
I was disappointed to hear it come to an end.

Introspective

Something to listen to when you're in the mood to contemplate life, family and relationships. I'm not sure what the author was aiming for, but there were some "nuggets" of life lessons in this rather disparate story.