Dear John

John Tyree is a restless young man from Wilmington, North Carolina, drinking too much and drifting, when he enlists in the Army. Home on a two-week leave, he meets Savannah Lynn Curtis, a devout college student helping build houses with Habitat for Humanity. Over a single summer they fall deeply in love, and they promise to wait for each other until his discharge.

Their relationship then has to survive on letters and short visits. John's father, a quiet, withdrawn man devoted to his coin collection, is a constant presence in the background, and Savannah sees in him a side of John's family that John himself never understood. When the attacks of September 11 prompt John to re-enlist, the separation stretches far past what either of them planned, and the distance begins to wear on them.

Dear John is a letter-driven love story about duty, patience and the cost of the choices people make for each other. It is told in the first person by John, looking back, and it deals with war, illness and neurodiversity alongside the romance. Nicholas Sparks has said it was inspired by the experiences of his cousin, who served in the U.S. Armed Forces. It was adapted into a 2010 film directed by Lasse Hallstrom.