Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye - A Novel

by Nick Alexander

Book Overview

Mark is looking for love in all the wrong places. He always ignores the warning signs preferring to dream, time and again, that he has finally met the perfect lover until, one day...Through fifty... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 2952489904
• ISBN13: 9782952489904
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Bigfib Books
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Elusive love

Mark is looking for that elusive man, the one whom he can love and build the rest of his life with, but search as he may, it seems near impossible, there is always a problem. Through fifty encounters, from one side of the world to the other the story relates his efforts, some don't even reach his front door, some get a second chance, and others might just last a brief time. Is he doomed to fail? Nick Alexander writes perceptively, frankly and lucidly and with economy, wasting no time on florid descriptions, but quickly getting to the heart of each encounter. It all makes for a fast paced, witty, entertaining, insightful and at times moving read. The story continues in Alexander's next novel, Sottopassaggio, which I must now read.

Depressing?? This???

I just had to write a review here. Saying that 50 Ways to say goodbye is depressing is just dumb. I spent a whole weekend tucked up with this book. It's Ironic, iconic, intelligent, and yes, very very funny. Certain chapeters (the egg man for one) had me spitting my beer out. Any gay man with a bit of a sex-life who doesn't enjoy reading this really does need some zoloft. - Greg.

Better Than Most Fiction Out There

Many of us know what it's like to hit the bars or the Internet time and time again, only to be disappointed. Nick Alexander shows us 50 scenarios in which romance can take a wrong turn, and still manages to be really funny. The scene at Club Med was so hilarious that I laughed throughout the night, and my roommates thought I was quietly crying in my bedroom. He also dashes any contrived ideas you might have about living in the south of France, or for that matter, going to the Syndey gay Mardi Gras. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel.

A Fresh New Voice

This little book reminds me of the best writing of Armistead Maupin and Patrick Gale. The narrator is a young 30-something who is on a constant quest for Mr. Right in all the wrong places-- well, actually in every place: England, France, Australia, the U. S, and in selected cities and bars of these countries as well as well as the internet and biker organizations. Almost to a person, these love objects are humpy beyond words at first blush; but things are never as they seem. Mr. Alexander writes with a great deal of flair and humor, is brilliant with dialogue and certainly can coin a phrase. He makes a verb out of "double take." One Roberto de Milano "seems larger than life, brick-chicken-shed of a man." He is also very good at summing up in a few sentences what many of us have felt about a PNB (Potential New Boyfriend) the moment we sense that we have taken a wrong turn and are heading in the wrong direction a la Robert Frost. About Luc, whom the narrator has met in the internet. "'I feel happier here than I have for ages.' A Cold front moves over my heart; I shiver. . . 'I love this,' he says. 'I love being here, your house, the garden, the cat,' he laughs. 'I think I love you too,' he says. It's too soon and it's all too much. And it's all the wrong way round. I can feel my heart closing down. . . I don't want to be the all-in-one solution to anyone's problems." Witty, sophisticated, addictive-- these loosely connected chapters add up to a fine novel. One other thing: you'll never feel the same way about a hard-boiled egg after reading about the narrator's encounter with the Egg Man.

A Strange and Wonderful Novel

This is a strange and wonderful novel.I read it in a single long weekend, and I laughed out loud and wept a bit too (prompting some very strange looks from my husband.)When the book ended I felt empty and sad and wise and desperate for something else to replace it.It's taken me a while to work out just what it is about this novel, because I believe that it's something magical and rare.This book somehow manages to be more than the sum of the stories it contains and each story somehow manages to be more than the sum of the words that make it up.Nick Alexander writes with a shocking lack of description, some of the tightest prose you will ever see, but the images and emotions created are vibrant and absorbing and at times overpowering.This may sound over the top but I actually think that no novel like this has ever been written, and certainly no "gay" novel.It's like reading some wonderful mixture of Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness writing and Armistead Maupin's cheeky Tales of the City, with a dash of Queer as Folk thrown in for good measure.Don't be put off by the 'gay' label. Buy it. Read it. Then wait desperately for this man's next novel.