On the morning after her twenty-ninth birthday, Nora Bennett makes a quiet, stubborn promise to herself:
one hundred first dates in the year before she turns thirty. No expectations. No rules.
No one spared — least of all herself.

What begins as a mildly self-deprecating project in a city of eleven million becomes something else entirely.
Across twenty evenings, Nora sits across from Daniel, who orders the lobster and suggests they go Dutch.
From Alex, who never shows up, to Thomas, who brings his mother to the café. From the bartender with sad eyes
to Frankie the comedian — and then there is Luca, the architect who walks her through the inside
of a building he hasn't yet built, and whose fingerprints remain on her long after he proves to be, specifically,
the right soul at the wrong moment.

There is also a best friend named Clara, who is funnier than she has any right to be at eleven o'clock on a Friday.
A mother who calls every Sunday at six. And a growing pile of small paper slips in a drawer by the bed —
on which Nora is teaching herself, one sentence at a time, how to see a man clearly,
and how to stand inside her own life.

Warm, sharply funny, occasionally devastating, and quietly radical — The Collection
is the opening volume of a five-book story that charts twenty of the hundred dates, the comedy of first impressions,
the private humiliations turned into anecdotes, and the slow, surprising realization that the woman you become
while looking for love is more interesting than the woman who was waiting to be found.

By the end of this book, Nora will be thirty. The real work will have just begun.