This Is a Love Story

A Novel

By: Jessica Soffer

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.

An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose. It is about love that endures despite what life throws at us, or perhaps even because of it.

©2025 Jessica Soffer (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Written with delicate and beautiful brush strokes, this is a love story of a long marriage, a love story of Central Park, a story of how hard life can be, and how the hard leaves its mark, but the love does too. Every once in a while I read a novel and think, What a gift. This is one of those books." —Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward

"This Is A Love Story is Jessica Soffer’s iridescent, kaleidoscopic, homerun of a novel. It’s a beautiful book of seasons, marking the cycles of a city, a family, the creative process, and a single and singular life." —Nathan Englander, New York Times bestselling author of Dinner at the Center of the Earth

"This Is A Love Story is a revelation—the kind of novel to read in one sitting. It performs the magic trick of being a highly specific story that feels universal and timeless. When you finish, you'll find that your worldview has been gently and deftly altered by an author whose tenderness toward her characters—and toward language itself—is unparalleled." —Liz Moore, bestselling author of Long Bright River and The God of the Woods