Every relationship has one beginning.
This one has two endings.

Andy loves Jen. Jen loved Andy.
And he can’t work out why she stopped.

Now he is. . .
1. Without a home
2. Waiting for his stand-up career to take off
3. Wondering why everyone else around him seems to have grown up while he wasn’t looking

Set adrift on the sea of heartbreak at a time when everything he thought he knew about women, and flat-sharing, and his friendships has transformed beyond recognition, Andy clings to the idea of solving the puzzle of their broken relationship. Because if he can find the answer to that, then maybe Jen can find her way back to him.

Andy still has a lot to learn, not least his ex-girlfriend’s side of the story.

Good Material by Dolly Alderton is an amusing and touching story about a break-up from the POV of 35-year-old comedian Andy.

The story follows Andy as he navigates life when his girlfriend Jen dumps him after they return home from a mini break in Paris. He is beside himself as he really loves Jen and he is also confused as to what went wrong.

Just like with grief from the death of a loved one, break-ups go through numerous stages and this book shows Andy going through them all. The last section is from Jen’s POV and you get to discover why she broke up with him.

With Andy being a comedian you get quite a lot of hilarity coming through, though it isn’t just him that brings the humour, some of the secondary characters do too, especially Avi’s (Andy’s best friend) kids and fellow comedian Emery.

I loved the way the book was told and how we got flashbacks to when Andy and Jen first got together. It is quite unusual in that we get a story like this told from a male POV, it is certainly refreshing.

Good Material sucked me in and held me within its pages. Once I started I didn’t want to put it down. The book flows with ease and you get lost in a sea of wallowing, friendships, comedy, and music. An amazing story and one I just adored from beginning to end.

Dolly Alderton is an award-winning author and journalist. She is a columnist for The Sunday Times Style and has also written for GQ, Red, Marie Claire and Grazia. From 2017 to 2020, she co-hosted the weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast The High Low alongside journalist Pandora Sykes.

Her first book Everything I Know About Love became a top five Sunday Times bestseller in its first week of publication and won a National Book Award for Autobiography of the Year. Her first novel Ghosts was published in October 2020 and was also a top five Sunday Times Bestseller.