By Jovanna Brinck
Book Columnist
On New Year’s Eve, four strangers meet at the top of Toppers’ House, an infamous building in London know for suicide, expecting to jump off and take their lives. All came from different backgrounds and had different experiences.
Martin Sharp was a famous talk show host until he slept with an under-aged girl and lost his job, his family, and his dignity.
Maureen has not truly lived life since her son was born mentally disabled nineteen years ago.
Jess is completely crazy and is being suffocated by her parents ever since her older sister went missing a few years back.
JJ, the only American, is in search of his ex-girlfriend after he broke up with her, and his band back in America.
All being different ages, these four individuals would have never known each other in the real world. After Jess convinces the group to delay their suicides to help her find her boyfriend, they step off the ledge and back to reality. Believing that their own situation is worse than the others, they give each other six weeks to find a reason to live. The quartet soon find that, although they can’t stand each other, they can’t cope with life without one another.
They meet occasionally in coffee shops, talking about their issues. They each try to help one another, even though none of them want to be saved themselves. They fight. They accuse each other of robbing them of their chance to end the pain on that night. Through all the bickering, however, they find that they saved each other that night, and none of them really wanted to die.
These four lonely strangers find company in one another and learn things about life that they would have never learned on their own.
A Long Way Down is a pretty old book, as it was published ten years ago, but it is still relevant to today. It was adapted into a British movie in 2014.
I really enjoyed the characters and how they interacted with one another. They weren’t always nice to each other, but the conversations in the book seemed so genuine, without sugarcoating anything.
A Long Way Down is both hilarious and emotional at the same time. Nick Hornby knows how to entertain his audience while throwing some completely serious situations at them. This book shows its readers that everyone is going through different hardships and sometimes you just need moral support from others going through hardships to realize you are not alone.
