Culture

Author: David Nicholls, (4.5/5)

One Day is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. It begins in Edinburgh in 1988 with two recently graduated uni students having what they assume will be a one-night stand. Immediately I felt like the target demographic. This one night fling turns into a lengthy friendship, and the book follows Dexter and Emma’s lives over the next 20 years revisiting the characters for one day each year on the anniversary of that fateful romp in a university dorm.
 
Nicholls creates two extremely believable characters that you both love and resent over the course of the book. It certainly has a When Harry Met Sally feel about it, but this book is more than a saccharine romantic comedy. Nicholls is perceptive and witty about relationships and the modern world in the most wonderful way. Dex and Em are harsh on themselves and harsh on the world and this cynicism makes the rom-com aspects of the story somehow more truthful. A lesser writer would let the one-day-each-year aspect of the book detract from the narrative flow, but Nicholls totally pulls it off.
 
One Day is being Hollywoodised this September in a film staring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess (that sexy dude from Across the Universe). Definitely a good idea to read the book first as the twists and turns of the plot are half the fun and even if the film is the best adaptation ever, it will act as a big fat spoiler.
 
This possibly sounds like a very girly book akin to The Time Traveller’s Wife; but it’s not. Yes there are certainly chick lit elements, but the witticisms and cynicisms are reminiscent of High Fidelity making it borderline dick lit. I certainly think guys will find this enjoyable.
 
Watching Dexter and Emma navigate the big scary post-university world was possibly one of my favourite aspects of the book. If One Day taught me anything, it’s that as an arts student there is an awful possibility that I too could end up working at a shitty faux-Mexican restaurant for 2+ years. Definitely going to try and avoid that.
 
I highly recommend One Day. It’s creatively told with a compelling narrative, funny, truthful, endearing and often heart-wrenchingly sad.