Allie learns that Noah had written letters to her for one year after their breakup. They have dinner together and talk about their lives and the past. Seeing each other brings on a flood of memories and strong emotions in both of them. They were separated by class, as she was the daughter of a wealthy family, and he worked as a laborer in a lumberyard. They are meeting, again, after a 7-year separation, which followed their brief but passionate summer romance when her family was visiting the town. Meanwhile, Allie, 24, sees the house in the newspaper and decides to pay him a visit. He finishes restoring an antebellum-style house, after his father's death. Noah, 24, returns from World War II to his town of New Bern, North Carolina. The novel opens with Noah Calhoun, an old man, reading to a woman in a nursing home. In The Notebook, he tried to express the long romantic love of that couple. In interviews, Sparks said he was inspired to write the novel by the story of his wife's grandparents, who had been married for more than 60 years when he met them. The Notebook was a hardcover best seller for more than a year. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list in its first week of release. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for the book from the Time Warner Book Group, and the novel was published in October 1996.

Literary agent Theresa Park discovered Sparks by picking the book out of her agency's slush pile and reading it. The Notebook was Nicholas Sparks first published novel and written over a time period of six months in 1994. Released in 1996, the romance novel was later adapted into a popular 2004 film of the same name. The Notebook is the debut novel by American novelist Nicholas Sparks.

Letters of note book