The Notebook

The Notebook was Nicholas Sparks's first published novel and appeared in October 1996. It opens with Noah Calhoun, an old man, reading aloud to a woman in a nursing home. The story he reads is set on the North Carolina coast in 1946, where Noah is home from the Second World War and working to restore an old plantation house, still thinking about the girl he loved one summer fourteen years earlier and has been unable to find or forget since.

The reading and the story move towards one another as the book goes on. The man reading is Noah, and the woman he reads to is his wife, who has Alzheimer's disease and does not recognise him; he is also unwell himself, dealing with a third cancer along with heart disease, kidney failure and severe arthritis in his hands. When he resumes the story, he describes the life the two of them had together: her career as a noted painter, their children, growing old, and the diagnosis that changed their household.

Sparks wrote the novel over a period of six months in 1994, and the literary agent Theresa Park offered to represent him after finding the manuscript in her agency's unsolicited submissions. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name released in 2004.