Good Material

Andy is thirty-five, a struggling stand-up comedian, and completely blindsided: Jen, the woman he loves and assumed he would marry, has ended their four-year relationship, and he has no idea why. Adrift, humiliated, and unable to let go, Andy spirals through the wreckage of the breakup — dissecting every memory for clues, torturing himself over her social media, crashing on friends' sofas, and generally making a mess of moving on.

Sharp, painfully funny, and tender, Dolly Alderton's Good Material is an anatomy of heartbreak told from the rarely-heard male perspective — until, in its final act, it hands the story to Jen, and everything the reader thought they understood shifts.

It is a novel about love, friendship, ambition, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive being left.