Turn a betrayal inside out and you found its opposite, a secret and a bond. Perhaps that was what friendship came down to: a lifelong, affectionate mutual blackmail.
Neil and Adam, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, meet one golden summer in California and, despite their different backgrounds, soon become best friends. Buton a camping trip in Yosemite they lead each other into wrongdoing that, years later, both will desperately regret.
Their connection holds through love affairs, fatherhood, the wild successes and unforeseen failures of booming London, as power and guilt ebb between them.
Then the truth of that long-ago night emerges.
What happens when you discover that the friendship you can’t live without was always built on a lie?
Neil and Adam, two young men on the cusp of adulthood, meet one golden summer in California and, despite their different backgrounds, soon become best friends. Buton a camping trip in Yosemite they lead each other into wrongdoing that, years later, both will desperately regret.
Their connection holds through love affairs, fatherhood, the wild successes and unforeseen failures of booming London, as power and guilt ebb between them.
Then the truth of that long-ago night emerges.
What happens when you discover that the friendship you can’t live without was always built on a lie?
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Reviews
Miller is an energetic, muscular writer with a talent for storytelling and a fine ear for dialogue . . . unlikely to disappoint
Gripping, affecting and memorable
I was mesmerized by its versatility . . . I adored the story of Neil and Adam . . . towards the end, it felt as if I knew them both, and the moral questions raised throughout are so universal . . . [A] beautiful story
Two things make Miller's writing dazzle. One is his glorious perspicacity about people and relationships of all sorts: friendships stained with betrayal and competitiveness, work acquaintanceships and love relationships alike. He's witty as well as insightful . . . Miller's other great strength is the aptness and originality of his metaphors and similes . . . It was a challenge for Miller to impress as much with his second novel as he did with his first, but it is one to which he has risen with assurance
Compelling, elegant and deeply insightful. You won't soon forget it
Couldn't stop reading - an intense morality tale
The Faithful Couple is a gripping work of unsettling power and grace
[Miller] is at his most incisive in his patient, exacting study of masculinity. Not since Martin Amis in his pomp has a British writer dealt so honestly and unflinchingly with the privileges and challenges that are inherent in maleness
Lucid and engaging . . . The Faithful Couple is a thoughtful, frequently witty and insightful book
After his exquisite debut, Snowdrops, Miller has returned to serve up another feast of sumptuous prose. Witty, moving and beautifully observed, it carries you along on a wave of sheer brilliance. This is an exceptional novel and Miller is the real deal
Oozes with tension. Patricia Highsmith . . . would have admired and loved this book in equal measure
[An] intelligent, perceptive look at contemporary life, both beautifully written and gently satirical . . . Miller's book has some similarities with One Day in that it has carefully observed state-of-the-nation elements and uses hindsight to offer some wry observations on contemporary life. Yet it is a more lyrical book than David Nicholls's, elegantly sidestepping cliche and melodrama in favour of something truer to everyday life. On the evidence of this and Snowdrops, Miller is a thrilling new talent
Blown away by #TheFaithfulCouple - next novel by @ADMiller18. You won't find a better - more taut - exploration of male friendship
Miller gets the love/hate rivalry lurking at the bottom of so many male friendships just right, setting the nuances of class and the different guises of success against the corrupting whiff of money over the past two decades
It's easy to imagine A. D. Miller as a literary David Attenborough . . . Miller reveals a zoologist's eye for the rituals and dynamics of mateship . . . A portrait of a male friendship, free from the whiff of trenchfoot or "Iron John" silliness or new man self-consciousness, is a rare thing
This could be the One Day of male friendship . . . A book of deep insight from a writer emerging as one of our leading novelists
The book The Faithful Couple most brings to mind is the bestselling One Day by David Nicholls . . . but Miller has the edge on Nicholls as a writer, and is skilled at the economical turn of phrase. Friendship, he writes, is "a luxury in any utilitarian calculus" - "no money, no sex, no tangible pay-off of any kind". Except for readers of The Faithful Couple, who reap dividends
Powerful and moving. I loved The Faithful Couple