the last book I ever read (Anne Enright's The Gathering, excerpt one)

from Anne Enright's The Gathering, winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize:

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.