The Best of Me

The Best of Me is a novel by the American writer Nicholas Sparks, published in 2011. It is a contemporary romance set in North Carolina, and it was adapted for film in 2014.

The book follows Dawson Cole and Amanda Collier, who meet at school in 1984 and fall in love despite the fact that their families sit at opposite ends of the town's social order. Dawson's people are the ones the town has decided against, and Amanda's are the ones it approves of, and the story of their teenage years is the story of a relationship that both of them know cannot simply continue as it is. The novel then follows them into adult life, when Dawson works on an oil rig and Amanda has made a life somewhere else entirely, and brings them back together through the death of a man who mattered to both of them. The arrangement he left behind requires them to return to the town, and the book deals with whether a first love that ended for reasons outside the couple's control can be revisited when both of them are middle-aged.

Sparks writes in the small-town American romance tradition, and his novels depend on ordinary lives, practical problems and the pull of a place a character has left.