A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

I've never read one of his books but they keep getting made into movies so they can't be all bad, can they?

I didn't really expect him to be such an excellent writer, but he is! He's engaging and witty and fun and pretty smart, all of which are things I appreciate in a writer.

These four people meet on the roof of a building in London on New Year's Eve. Their individual plans were to jump off the building, for one reason or another, because they've had it with their lives. They find, once they meet each other up there, that none of them are terribly interested in dying, and instead form an unlikely and interesting friendship that gets explored in different ways through out the rest of the book. It's told in interchanging first person, which isn't a style I normally appreciate but which works really well here.

-Merrin