Mark is looking for love in all the wrong places. He always ignores the warning signs preferring to dream, time and again, that he has finally met the perfect lover until, one day, he really does... Through fifty different adventures, Nick Alexander takes us on a tour of modern gay society: bars, night-clubs, blind dates, Internet dating...It’s all here. Funny and moving by turn, 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye, is ultimately a series of candidly vivid snapshots and a poignant exploration of that long winding road; the universal search for love.
Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye is the volume one of a trilogy.



Selected Press Reviews:

Paul Burston - Time Out (London) – Sept 28th 2004

Mark is a single gay man who’s desperately looking for
love. Unfortunately, he hasn’t yet mastered the gay art of
cruising for sex while concealing your true feelings. Faced
with a potential lover, he lets his desperation show
through and his imagination run away with him. He falls
in love with Dirk, who just wants to be friends, and with
Hugo, who hangs around for a while before deciding that
this isn’t the relationship for him. He has devastating
crushes on Frenchmen and Italians. In Sydney, he meets a
man who naturally assumes that Mark will join him and his boyfriend for sex in a
sauna. When Mark declines his offer his response is one of total disbelief: ‘Crazy
planet! Like, you refusing me!’
Mark’s story is told through 50 tales of sexual misadventure, guiding the reader on a
whistle-stop tour of the modern gay world of bars, clubs and Internet dating. This
might sound contrived, but Nick Alexander invests Mark’s story with such warmth,
and writes so knowingly about the pleasures and pitfalls of love, the formal conceit is
soon forgotten. This is a wonderful read - honest, moving, witty and really rather
wise.


Tim Teeman - The Times – July 17th 2004

Nick Alexander - author of 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye, a witty, polished collection
of vignettes set around his experience of gay dating - reports that many of the
excruciating incidents (terrible blind dates etc) are true. But he has given up trawling
the internet looking for Mr Right. “It’s an addiction,” he says. Indeed, after years of
tragic mistakes, he has met somebody very nice.
Order this snappy little number.

Joe Storey-Scott - Gay Times - October 2004.

Basically, a series of short vignettes (I only counted 45, but don’t feel short changed)
detailing the various connections, misconnections, wrong numbers, bad
transatlantines and the occasional, “sorry, this number is no longer in service” typical
of the world of modern dating. Truthful, moving, witty, downright human – and
utterly optimistic, despite the knocks and knock-backs; the title could just as easily
have been 50 Reasons to Say Hello. Ignore the disappointingly perfunctory cover
design and just read the thing. You’ll wonder why no major publisher picked this
book up (perhaps it’s just a matter of time). Disarmingly, honestly personal, in a
way that makes the book speak to everyone (and had me feeling like the author had
been dipping in my secret diary).

Nick Alexander's 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye was published by BIGfib in 2004. Buy it <here>.

Read Nick Alexander's Author Profile <here>

Support your local bookstore <here>

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