Tender is the Night

New Penguin Essentials edition of the heartbreaking classic of the roaring twenties, Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight.' American psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole live in a villa on the French Riviera, surrounded by a circle of glamorous friends. When beautiful film star Rosemary Hoyt arrives she is drawn to the couple - Dick contemplates an affair, while Nicole believes she's found a new best friend. But a dark secret lies at the centre of the Divers' marriage. A secret which could destroy Dick and Nicole and those close to them... and those close to them...

F Scott Fitzgerald was born Minnesota in 1896 and went to Princeton University, which he left to join the army in 1917. He was said to have epitomised the Jazz Age, which he himself emphatically denied. In the 1920s he married Zelda Sayre. Their traumatic marriage and his subsequent breakdowns became the leading influence in his writing, which included THE GREAT GATSBY and THE LAST TYCOON. He died suddenly in 1940. ;He died suddenly in 1940.

"A tragedy backlist by beauty." Daily Express

"For Fitzgerald desolation is a precondition of the lyrical. Hence the most distinctive impression of Tender: A beautiful novel about failure." Independent

"It is one of those books that you read and feel a shift... the story is told so poetically and eloquently. It is one of those books that you read and think: if I could only remember that sentence -- it is so beautiful." Sam Taylor-Wood