The longest ride

The Longest Ride came out on 17 September 2013, and it was Nicholas Sparks's seventeenth romance novel.

The story is told from three points of view. Ira Levinson is ninety-one, in poor health, and trapped in his car after a crash on a quiet road; he stays alert partly because his dead wife, Ruth, appears to him as an image and helps him go back over their life together, from the way they met to the paintings they collected and the hard years of the Second World War. The crash leaves him with time to think, and almost nothing else.

A few miles away Sophia Danko, a student at Wake Forest, is about to meet Luke Collins, a cowboy and a bull rider who takes risks she has never seen anyone take before, and their relationship has to survive the dangers of his career. The two couples have almost nothing in common, and the book brings their stories together; one of its inspirations was Black Mountain College, the liberal arts school that ran from 1933 to 1957.