The Big Love - VENDIDO!

Sarah Dunn
Little Brown, July 2004
241 pp.
Translation: Nicholas Ellison

Rights sold:
*** Brasil: Nova Fronteira ***
UK: Michael Joseph
Germany: Goldmann
Israel: Modan
Italy: Salani
Netherlands: De Bezige Bij
Finland: TAMMI
Sweden: Bonniers
Poland: Bertelsmann
Denmark: Lademann
Spain: Circulo De Leitores bookclub

*** FILM DEAL! ***
Universal Studios, on behalf of Bob Ducsay and Steve Sommers of The Sommers Company, have just optioned THE BIG LOVE for close to $500,000, with a Purchase Price well in excess of $1,000,000 and over $200,000 in bestseller bonuses. The producers are behind the blockbuster hits "The Mummy" and "The Matrix." - 03/08/2004

A stunning debut novel, THE BIG LOVE is a rich and incisive look at modern romance.

THE BIG LOVE is going into its third large printing before publication and ads will run in The New York Times seven times in the next few weeks. We already have a winner, and it appears we will have a major bestseller. - 30/06/2004

Book description:
In the tradition of female literary wits Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron, Ms. Dunn has crafted a novel of deeper resonance than the standard "chick-lit" fare. THE BIG LOVE is a delightful novel peppered with social satire, encouraging the reader to laugh out loud with Allison, the heroine, at the unexpected turns of life and love--and the humorous paths one forges just to keep going. THE BIG LOVE is infused with wit and folly while at the same time charging the world of the ‘small’ in everyday life with clarity and insight.

THE BIG LOVE sold to Little, Brown in a heated auction with five publishing houses bidding for North American rights for close to a half a million dollars. It was also pre-empted in the UK for high five-figures by the same editor of BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, with similarly large advances in the Netherlands and Israel. The German auction lasted for over two weeks and was won by Goldmann for a high five-figure sum.

This is a wonderfully funny debut novel. The true unpredictability of life is keenly observed by the author and a delightful road to travel for the reader.

Alison Hopkins is firmly, undoubtedly, and undeniably in love. She and Tom live together, they send wedding gifts as a unit, and, most important, they’re happy together-until the evening Tom goes out in the middle of a dinner party to buy some mustard and doesn’t come back. He calls Alison to say that he has fallen back in love with his ex-girlfriend Kate, the kind of woman about whom men say rhapsodically, "She’s like a drug." How can Alison compete with that? She had always feared that Tom’s looks would land her in trouble-having a handsome boyfriend is like owning a white couch, an invitation to disaster.
But if Tom isn’t Alison’s Big Love, who is?

Alison is tempted to take her humiliation and whip it into 700 words for the weekly column she writes about relationships for the local paper. Instead, she decides to treat her newfound freedom as a gift-a shimmering portal to a whole new life, a whole new her. She risks a fling with her boss and makes the delightful discovery that "movie sex"-like that scene in Fatal Attraction, with the water running and the dishes in the sink-isn’t a cinematic fiction.

But that is just the beginning of Alison’s quest for The Big Love. Applying her restless intelligence to all the questions of the heart in the modern age-Is love, in fact, enough? Does an undefined-yet-presumably-meaningless amorous encounter always turn out to be a mistake? What on earth do you tell your mother?-Alison plumbs the depths and takes sight on the heights that love can lead to. With a sharp eye, a skeptical wit, and an insatiable appetite for bridging the gulf between men and women, Sarah Dunn offers up a delectable first novel that is hilarious and heartbreaking, touching and true.

"The last thing my dinner party needed was what actually happened: an hour after he left, Tom called from a pay phone to tell me to go ahead without him, he wasn’t coming back, he didn’t have the mustard, and oh, by the way, he was in love with somebody else."
--from THE BIG LOVE

Quotes and Reviews:
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
The annals of love have recorded many a humiliating breakup over the years, but Alison Hopkins gets hit with a humdinger in this surprising, touching and hilariously deadpan debut novel. When she sends her live-in boyfriend Tom to the supermarket right before a dinner party, she figures the worst that can happen is that he’ll get the wrong mustard. Instead he calls from a pay phone to tell her he’s not coming back at all, because he’s fallen in love with his college sweetheart, Kate Pearce - with whom he’s been sleeping for five months. If Alison were a Sex and the City siren, she’d distract herself with martinis, Manolos and misappropriated men, but she’s a broke columnist for the floundering weekly The Philadelphia Times. Plus, though now lapsed, she was raised evangelist Christian. So it’s a new pair of hiking boots, pie-contest judging and furtive dalliances with a coworker for reluctant good-girl Alison as she tries to gauge the ins and outs of the single world that non-fundamentalists mastered in their early 20s. Alison’s struggles to fit into the mainstream world are fresh and full of wisdom, and Dunn’s humor is marvelously dry: “Bonnie had a sudden flash of what he might come up with on his own…so she drew a picture on a cocktail napkin of a wide band of channel-set diamonds, and she wrote down the words ‘platinum’ and ‘size six’ and ‘BIG’ and ‘SOON.’” This is a delightful exploration of the empowerment that comes from escaping a Big Love turned Bad Love.

"The ground is littered with failed attempts at I-lost-my-boyfriend attempts at comic fiction. But Ms Dunn’s book is brighter and funnier than most." -New York Times

"Sweetly neurotic and utterly believable, Alison charms with her emotional clumsiness and blushing sexual honesty." -Washington Post

THE BIG LOVE..."top-shelf chick lit" that "transcends its genre with 3-D characters and empathy." -New York Magazine

"Sarah Dunn’s keen observations of the unpredictability of life are delightful. This is a wonderfully funny debut novel." -Olivia Goldsmith, author of The First Wives Club

"A fresh, funny, and sometimes moving tale of love and life at mid-thirty among young professionals in urban Philadelphia, with a narrator who is as intelligent and ingratiating as Jane Eyre." -A. R. Gurney, author of Love Letters




About the author:
Sarah Dunn lives in New York City. This is her first novel