The Day I Lost the Ability to Capture Your Beauty: Love, Memory, and the Art of Letting Go - Paperback

For five years, he was the only person who never told her the truth.

She was supposed to be simple - a friend from a crowded table of friends, a name that came up in group jokes, a voice arguing good-naturedly across a café table on an ordinary Tuesday. He photographed her the way he photographed everything that quietly interested him: instinctively, constantly, without ever asking himself why.

It took him five years, one joke that landed wrong -"Fine, I'll marry him" - and a lifetime of looking through a lens to understand what his camera had actually been trying to tell him all along: he hadn't been capturing her.

He'd been capturing what he became, every time he was near her.

THE DAY I LOST THE ABILITY TO CAPTURE YOUR BEAUTY is a quiet, aching, ultimately hopeful debut about the kind of love that never announces itself - the kind you call friendship, or admiration, or habit, right up until the day you can't call it anything else. It's about what silence costs. What patience actually teaches you. And what's left behind when the person you loved builds a beautiful life that was never going to include you.

This isn't a love story about winning anyone. It's a love story about what loving someone fully, quietly, without any guarantee of return, makes of the person doing the loving.

Includes discussion questions - perfect for book clubs.

Is there someone you've loved quietly, for longer than you've ever admitted, even to yourself?

This book was written for you.

For readers of David Nicholls' One Day, Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, and anyone who has ever stood in front of a door they were too afraid to knock on.