Debut novel · Europe Books
The Story of Us
A love that consumes: a journey of healing, friendship and passion. A story about a love that enriches your life — about us, you and me, and how we found it.
362 pages · ISBN 9791256973163
Author's note
Written inside a healing
I wrote this book during a long healing journey, after years of personal struggle and a kind of emotional captivity. Music has always been the way I reach my own feelings, so it became the backbone of the book: every chapter carries a song.
What is on these pages is personal, raw and true. It is less a polished performance than a reconnection — with emotion, with healing, and with love.
The writing
Intimate, candid, emotionally raw
The prose is conversational and direct, layered with emotional depth and written in two alternating voices, so the relationship is seen from both inside and across. Dialogue is colloquial and immediate; reflection is lyrical.
Songs work as structure as much as mood — Paralysed, Home, Fix You — marking grief, healing, joy and intimacy. Emotional truth is chosen over polished perfection, every time.
The story
A journey in five movements
- 01
Friendship to love
Two people who have known each other since university, carrying years of unspoken feeling, tender gestures and missed timing — until the confession finally comes.
- 02
The intensity of first love
Once acknowledged, the bond deepens fast: urgent and gentle at once, intimate and mutually careful, transformative enough to heal old wounds.
- 03
Everyday life and challenges
Family dysfunction, addiction and mental health, professional weight, jealousy and insecurity — all met with honesty, communication and presence.
- 04
Growing together
Cooking and dancing, surprises and trips, grief and the loss of a parent, a shared home built out of difference and devotion.
- 05
Commitment and new beginnings
A surprise wedding in a small church, and a pregnancy carried with joy, uncertainty and hope — for better, for worse, in sickness and in health.
Themes
What the book is about
- Healing through love and connection
- Friendship that turns into romance
- Emotional vulnerability and resilience
- Personal and familial challenges
- The sanctity of everyday intimacy
- Commitment and shared futures
- Music as emotional expression
Readers
What readers are saying
“The text immediately grabs one from the first page.”
Cecilia Tibell is not only a fantastic integrative doctor but also a writer (and music nerd).
"The Story of Us" is a very intense, passionate and naked love story. The plot revolves around two friends who have been secretly in love with each other for many years. The book alternates between his and her perspective of the same events, and each chapter begins with song lyrics that tie into and reinforce the story.
The text immediately grabs one from the first page. Made me feel all of it — extremely strong, raw, beautiful and occasionally complicated. But it is also about vulnerability, and how love can heal.
Already in the foreword, something in me was awakened that disappeared when I got sick and that I had been looking for for 27 years. That strong zest for life and the intense, positive feelings that I completely lost slowly and quietly began to pop up. Little by little. They are still in there somewhere, and I think the book may have helped me start to remember what they felt like — and that I want to feel them. It reminded me that I have to find more ways to look for them.
Thank you, Cecilia, for making me start to recognise myself.
If you want to read a gripping and intense love story, I can highly recommend "The Story of Us".
Soundtrack
The playlist
A curated playlist of the songs that live inside the novel. Press play and read along.
In production
An immersive audiobook of The Story of Us
Original scoring, layered sound design and a narration built for headphones — the songs of the book made audible around the story.
Him
Geir Thomassen
Her
Phoebe Alice Ritche
