david nicholls books

David Nicholls Books In Order

Publication order of standalone novels, publication order of anthologies.

David Nicholls, a Briton, is an English writer who is also a screen writer. He is 48 years old. He attended college in Hampshire and acted different roles in various productions in college. He later graduated from college and trained as an actor in the USA. Afterwards, he proceeded to act professionally in his 20s, something he kept at for a while. His early acting career wasn’t without challenges though he later discovered his talent in writing.

He contributed scripts for television series and miniseries, an engagement he undertook quite seriously. When the show of one of the television series was canceled, his anger over it made him confine himself to writing. Later on, one of his books, the novel ‘One day’ was shown as a film. He adapted his novel, ‘Starter for 10’, for film which was shown in cinemas in 2006. He also made several film adaptations which were released for Cinemas in 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2014. His most notable books are ‘One Day’ and ‘Starter for 10’.

Nicholls also wrote plays for theater and was given an award for Author of the year in 2014 for the book ‘Us”.

The Book, “One Day” (Vintage Contemporaries)

In this book, the main characters Dexter Mayhew meets Emma Morley. After that initial meeting, their thoughts about each other never seem to leave them. These thoughts remain with them for the entire stretch of 20 years.The setting of this book is in the year 1988 where the author chooses the 15th day of July to be the focal point of the story between these two characters. The author artfully tells the readers about the various changing times of Dexter and Emma within 20 years but each landmark of these highlights happens to be that same day, 15th July of every year down the line.

Emma has loved Dexter secretly. She has a particular position about how things should be done. Dexter on the other hand is a free spirit and is portrayed as one with a carefree attitude. They retain their friendship even when circumstances cause them to go their separate ways. They both get jobs at some point in their lives. Dexter is portrayed as an individual living recklessly and while at it, bedding as many women as he can. Negative things happening to him do not deter him from his waywardness of drinking, using drugs and sleeping around. He was simply a pack of negative energy on the move.

On the other hand, Emma also has her fair share of misfortunes and as if that is not all,including low self esteem. Additionally, none of her relationships seem to work. Eventually, Dexter comes to terms with the fact that his best friend all along is just the one woman he should love and spend his life with. Reader will be interested to know what else transpires in this intriguing story.

The Book, “Us” The book tells the story of a married couple Douglas Petersen and his wife Connie. Douglas managed to seduce Connie and eventually get her to marry him. They settled down happily and got a son named Albie. It has been almost 30 years since they first met in London when one night, Connie drops the bombshell on Douglas by announcing that their marriage has come to an end and that she wanted a divorce. Douglas is taken aback because his love for her is still immense. The timing of this sad news is also awful considering their immediate future plans of touring Europe even as their son Albie plans to leave for college.

Connie is willing to go for the trip anyway, her divorce plans notwithstanding. She did not want to cancel the trip and also felt that the experience would do her son good. Douglas, on the other hand, secretly hopes that he can dissuade his wife from pursuing this unpalatable chosen end to their marriage while they are on their trip and possibly have some quality time with his son. This is a story of a man who is indeed optimistic that things will turn around for the better so that he does not have to lose the love of his life. He also hopes that he can get to know his son better while on the trip now that the two have not been so close.

This book masterfully uses the characters of Douglas and Connie to paint a real and practical image of marriage, its ups and downs, challenges of mid-life crisis and the delicate balancing act between what goes on in the heart and that which the head logically thinks and concludes on. This book brings to fore the challenges of marriage, parenting and changes through the varying stages of life including raising children and growing up. It is a story that many couples and parents alike will quickly identify with.

The readers will have to find out if the intended trip really does accomplish Douglas’ desire and fulfills his dreams of reclaiming his wife and son or not. Does Douglas get any life changing experiences that will lead to a rediscovery of himself?

Conclusion Nicholls tells stories that bring to mind the nostalgic memories of youthful energy, love at first sight, regrets and disappointments of wrong decision making, the clumsiness of youth as they grow up and the immaturity that must give way to adulthood eventually and then the ups and downs of experiences that are commonplace between couples in married life. His stories are examples of real life experiences which can be found among people at your next stop in one village, town or city.

It is not in contention that Nicholls is a writer who is gifted at writing classic novels with detailed descriptions and which also treat readers to a glimpse into the emotions of his characters and their lives in a way that is uniquely his own. Once one gets a hold of any of his books, they quickly get engrossed and find it hard to put them down. The story lines literally jump out of the pages and acquire lives of their own which take the readers on an all-absorbing, emotional journey. It is no wonder that once one of those books is in one’s hand, it can only be put down upon reaching the last full stop.

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You Are Here by David Nicholls – a touching tale of finding love and connection in nature

Honorary Associate in Creative Writing, The Open University

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Coming soon after the release of the Netflix version of One Day, David Nicholls’ latest novel is another bitter-sweet homage to skewed romance. While the lovers in One Day are divided by class and aspiration, in You Are Here it’s loneliness and previous heartbreak that get in the way.

Marnie, a struggling freelance copywriter, is not at first impressed by Michael, a grumpy geography teacher. She is a Londoner, living alone in a Herne Hill apartment; he lives in York, in the house that is a shell without his recently departed wife Natasha. Their bossy mutual friend Cleo, a deputy head teacher, organises a walking holiday on which she hopes to set them up with suitable people. These potential liaisons fail to materialise, so Marnie and Michael are thrown together.

Nicholls has an unerring ability to tap into the emotional zeitgeist, the competitiveness that fuels class unease (Starter for Ten), midlife marriage uncertainty (Us) and in this case, the sense of estrangement from community that has followed the pandemic. While Michael has the school, with its physical routines, lockdown has never really ended for Marnie.

Working from home, she has no need for human interaction and sometimes feels that she is better off without it, “she no longer trusted her face to do the right thing, operating it manually, pulling levers, turning dials, for fear that she might laugh at someone’s tragedy or grimace at their joke”. So she cancels meet-ups, friendships falter. For his part, Michael fears that he is doomed to become increasingly solitary, and “he wondered if, after a certain age, men could ever really like each other. The window for friendship was always small, and narrowed with age”.

Both sense they are looking into a void, the means to connect evading them. Michael feels “cracked and vulnerable, like a cup with a glued-on handle”. He attempts to impose logic and rationality onto heartbreak, planning to walk from one side of northern England to the other in record time. His aim is to exchange loneliness for solitude.

Marnie agrees to join against her better judgment, recognising that she needs some kind of change. Initially, they seem mismatched, he is “like someone leading a doomed expedition”, while she, dressed in new outdoor wear, is well beyond her comfort zone.

The novel is told in short chapters, alternating between Marnie and Michael’s point of view. Their hopes, dreams, fears and recollections are conveyed with subtle humour, and the reader quickly sees that loneliness is not the only thing they have in common.

Both have a deep longing for a true romance, not just dating or a sexual encounter, but the sort of relationship that makes sense of the world. The mood is reminiscent of Jane Austen’s final novel Persuasion , with its weight of missed opportunities and lost time.

And the action plays out against a brilliantly evoked landscape: the fells and lakes of northern England. This is one of the great pleasures of the book, and the maps of the route that punctuate the text highlight the importance of the journey.

Michael, the committed geography teacher, has an affinity with the landscape, solid and evolving over millions of years. But things are changing rather faster for him, despite his dogged reluctance to move on. The ever-shifting weather and conditions seem to underline that, there are surprises at every turn.

He attempts some cold water swimming and the water is “silver-tinged and viscous, like gin from an ice box”. And nothing is quite what it seems “the peaks were all around them now, outlined sharply against each other, like old-fashioned theatre flats”. Nicholls doesn’t make it overly picturesque either, acknowledging “the brown noise of the A1”.

This is a novel that takes its time, as it must do if it is to keep faith with the over-arching structure of a muddy walking holiday and its attendant boring bed and breakfasts. But the story builds relentlessly to a heart-wrenching climax, perfectly orchestrated, keeping the reader guessing – and hoping – to the last.

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The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden & One Day by David Nicholls Busy Black Mums Do Read

We seem to have our knickers in a twist with these 2 books! In this episode, Olamide and I review 2 completely different books across 2 genres. The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden was our March pick, to fit with our 'suspense' theme. Was it suspenseful? And is this one of our recommended reads? Listen to find out! One Day by David Nicholls was meant to be a feel good, romantic palette cleanser for two busy mums who just wanted an easy enough read. If only wishes were horses eh? This book had us divided and very much in our feels. If you would like to join us on our reading journey, why not read along with us? The theme for April was Personal Development. Current reads include: Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck and Financial Joy by Ken and Mary Okoroafor. You can follow us on Instagram @busyblackmumsdoread for more book recommendations. For feedback and suggestions, contact us at [email protected] Happy reading!

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David Nicholls’s secret formula to writing a hit modern romance

I f somebody had asked you a quarter of a century ago to name Britain’s most successful romantic novelist, your mind’s eye would have flooded with pink as you conjured up a vision of Dame Barbara Cartland. Asked the same question today, though, most people would picture not a flamboyant aristocratic authoress but a man, indeed something of an everyman: David Nicholls.

Nicholls, 57, assumed the position of the nation’s foremost heart-wringer in 2009 with his third novel One Day , which has gone on to sell three million copies in the UK and a further three million around the world. And 15 years on the book is now finding a new audience as the basis for a ratings-topping Netflix drama starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod as star-crossed lovers Dexter and Emma.

Today sees the publication of his sixth novel, You Are Here . There are always long gaps between his books, and he has insisted that it is pure coincidence that his latest is coming out just as the Netflix show has inspired a new wave of Nicholls-love.

One Day really took off in 2010 when it was issued in paperback. With every chapter set on the same day of each succeeding year – St Swithin’s Day, July 15 – the element of a random date allowed Nicholls to avoid clichéd romcom set pieces and dive instead into the nitty-gritty of quotidian life, the seemingly mundane days that saw Dexter and Emma’s friendship slowly blossom into love. As he has put it: “There’s no such thing as an ordinary day. I like the challenge of making often quite mundane days full of significance and full of intrigue.”

Nicholls has observed that he wanted “to balance the desire to write a big lush old-fashioned weepie and to write something that was a bit tougher, and a bit more realistic, a bit more down to earth.” Thus was established the Nicholls magic formula: unashamedly romantic storylines with echoes (often deliberately emphatic echoes) of classic romcoms, but concerning the lives not of soigné When Harry Met Sally-type New Yorkers or Richard Curtis poshoes but of ordinary middle-class people who have made a mild mess out of their lives and have little glamour to compensate for it. Characters who resemble the people his readers are or may have been at one time, in other words – albeit flatteringly endowed with a capacity for sitcom-worthy one-liners.   

Whether because we live in a more egalitarian age or a more solipsistic one, readers now seem to want books written about people like themselves rather than Cartland’s debs and dukes. This is something Nicholls seemed to grasp from the first, with his debut novel Starter for Ten (2003) having the unglamorous, low-key setting of an unnamed provincial university in the 1980s. His second novel, The Understudy (2005), drew on his previous life as a struggling actor and was less successful, perhaps because it was too far removed from his readers’ experiences.

Us, his fourth novel, is my favourite. It alternates between scenes set in the past showing how Douglas Petersen and his wife Connie met and fell in love, and in the present, when middle-aged Douglas is desperately trying to convince her not to divorce him. It illustrates one of Nicholls’s abiding themes: how people change over the years without actually shedding their old selves, so that their altered personalities and priorities remain a cause of continuous surprise to them.

There is, however, a certain predictability and familiarity to much of Nicholls’s writing: the comic scenes in which Douglas eats soup that’s too spicy or takes drugs for the first time are very funny but not exactly original. It is notable that when Nicholls talked about One Day on the Radio 4 programme Bookclub, he apologetically used the word “corny” to describe a number of different scenes: there is a sense of a writer feeling slightly trapped by an audience-pleasing template.

His 2019 novel Sweet Sorrow is about Charlie, a 16-year-old pursuing his first love affair with one of his fellow cast members in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet. I read it just after Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Pericles, and I remember wondering what it would be like if Nicholls tried his hand at something so left-field, rather than structuring a book around the old crowd-pleaser R&J.

But as always the truth of his insights into very ordinary lives made Sweet Sorrow seem fresh: it is typical of Nicholls that his hero is not a handsome, dashing Romeo type, but is cast in the play as the unmemorable Benvolio, because the director thinks he has “a faceless, milk-and-water quality that is just perfect”. Nicholls is the poet of the Inbetweener.

Nicholls began his writing career as a scriptwriter on Cold Feet and other television series, and one can see that his novels have the carefully structured plot arcs of popular TV shows: but he is also steeped in literature. He has claimed as his greatest influences the mid-20th century US writers – John Cheever, Richard Yates, Updike, Roth, Salinger – who made an effort to “give ‘ordinary’ lives a real scale and drama”.

Nicholls has also adapted several of his favourite literary works as screenplays, and it is clear that they have fed into his fiction. When he wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film adaptation of Great Expectations (the one with Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Havisham and Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch), Nicholls fans might already have been aware of his passion for Dickens; as he has put it, Starter for Ten “is stolen from Great Expectations. It features a ridiculous yearning for a woman who clearly will never love the main character back. And the characters; Alice is very much inspired by Estella and Spencer is a Steerforth character from David Copperfield.”

Thomas Hardy is also an abiding influence. Nicholls has said that his 2008 adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles “gave me the confidence to write something other than comedy”, leading him to add to One Day the tragic element that had been missing from his previous novels. Indeed the whole structure of One Day was inspired by a passage in which Tess ruminates on the unknown significance of certain days; while the scene in which Dexter’s passionate letter to Emma goes astray echoes the fateful misdelivering of Tess’s letter to Angel Clare, enforcing the Hardy-esque message of the huge importance in the course of our lives of lucky and unlucky chance happenings.

Nicholls is a keen Shakespearean, too: he updated Much Ado About Nothing for the BBC’s Shakespeare Re-Told series in 2005, and there is a good deal of Beatrice and Benedick in the mismatched-but-meant-for-each-other dynamic of Emma and Dexter’s relationship, and in their putdown-heavy repartee. It was no surprise to discover from Sweet Sorrow that Nicholls loves Romeo and Juliet too: like that play, One Day has the structure of a comedy but, having primed you for a happy ending, delivers a shocking death that gets you in the solar plexus.

Not everyone admires Nicholls: our reviewer, Claire Allfree, has found that the “cosiness” of Nicholls’s new novel means that “before long, it all becomes dull”. But that’s the risk of trying to reflect everyday life in fiction: and for many readers no British novelist currently at work has come closer to achieving John Updike’s stated aim as a novelist: “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”

You Are Here is published by Sceptre at £20

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David Nicholls: ‘I don’t think I’ll write another love story’

As the global bestseller One Day reduces a new generation to tears, it’s fair to say that no other author captures the bittersweet highs and lows of falling in love better than David Nicholls. He talks about nostalgia, self-confidence and the rewards of solitude

T his is the year of David Nicholls. Which has come as a bit of a shock, it turns out, to David Nicholls. He had not planned to release his sixth (and, he thinks, his best) novel You Are Here at the same time that the adaptation of his literary phenomenon One Day hit Netflix , or as a musical of his 2003 novel Starter for Ten opened in Bristol . “In one way, it’s very exciting. But in another way, it’s a bit…” he says, searching for a word that is kind, “overwhelming.”

The year of David Nicholls means this is a year of the bittersweet. Of love as a matter of life and death and the path from friendship to romance, and all the tiny, exquisite, effortless banalities of modern life that have seen his work, which has encompassed film, telly (including Patrick Melrose , the Emmy-nominated adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s novels) and particularly his novels, reframe what the truest story of true love could be. Rather than romcom, one reviewer described his work as “rom-trag”.

When Nicholls’s agent, Jonny Geller, first read one of his manuscripts 20 years ago, he “felt instantly that he had an uncanny ability to write stories that seem to reflect my life – as if he had been in the room”. Geller soon realised he was not alone in that feeling. “It’s not just the comedy but the observations about disappointment, frustration, yearning and trying to be a better version of oneself that makes his stories universal.” Nicholls’s books have sold more than 9m copies worldwide, in 40 different languages. One Day alone has sold more than 6m worldwide and, 15 years old now, is currently back in the Top 10 charts after the success of the Netflix adaptation, which in its first month was watched by over 15 million people, one of whom was Kim Kardashian. She recommended it to her 364m followers on Instagram, saying: “If you want a good cry.”

We are meeting for lunch near his house in London, where he’s lived for 20 years with his partner, Hannah, and their two teenage children. Recently, though, he has been making a regular journey up to the mountains or the coast, where he will walk, by himself in weather-appropriate clothing for, he says, brows lowered, “time to think”. In his new novel, two lonely people fall in love on a 200-mile walk across the north of England – for Nicholls, however, it is crucial he walks alone. He says it’s time to think, yes, “but, you know, you can think on the beach, can’t you? You can think somewhere warm. I don’t know what it is about the arduousness of it that’s appealing.” He allows himself a moment of bewilderment, gently spearing some cheese on his fork. “I’ve always hated sport. Anyone throwing a ball at me, I feel, is hostile. That thing of wanting to beat someone. I wonder if walking is just the closest I can get to a sport in my life? I don’t quite understand it, except that a certain kind of melancholy and loneliness is part of it, and I would rather be by myself.” Does he come up with ideas while walking? “I always think I should. I have a little waterproof notebook. It just looks like a regular notebook, but the pages don’t curl when they get wet. I’ve carried this notebook with me for 10 years and it’s got nothing in it at all. Ha!”

His first real attempts at writing were letters. Now 57, Nicholls was born in Hampshire and, after university (he was the first person he’d known who’d been), won a scholarship to study drama in New York. When he returned to England he worked as a bartender while auditioning for acting roles. “There’s a line in One Day where Dexter says that he wishes he could give Em the gift of confidence, which is something a friend of mine said to me then.” This was London in the early 90s and, “I think I was having quite a bad time. I was trying to be an actor, but often it was quite humiliating. It was lonely, really, looking back. And this is the time where everyone was meant to be, you know, out at some rave on the M25 and I really wasn’t.” What he was doing was crafting long, poetic, funny letters to his friends and “making the worst cappuccino on the King’s Road”. He was worried, “All the time. About the future, worried about what I was going to do, worried about money.” He didn’t let his parents see his flat – a bed and an electric hob in a very small room – he was too ashamed. “But they were worried, too. And confused, because I’d gone to university – it wasn’t meant to be like this.”

He got sporadic acting work, but knew he didn’t have what it took to be great. “I was too keen and too self-conscious. I was always putting on a voice, always doing too much. Just too kind of puppyish and keen to please. Which is why I got work. But if I sat and watched the really great actors…” He starred in The Seagull at the National Theatre alongside Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Helen McCrory. “They just seemed to be doing something I couldn’t do. They were very still, they were very calm. They were very physically free and yet in control.” He was not. It occurred to him, around 1996, that while he didn’t really know what to do on stage, he did know what to do to a script to improve it.

“I wasn’t always right, but I felt on safer ground.” Aged 27 he was offered two jobs – one was to understudy for a part in Twelfth Night and the other was as a script reader for BBC radio. He chose the latter and gave up acting for good. “I realise now I learned so much from acting and from listening to plays being performed night after night after night. I used to feel quite bitter and angry, that those were wasted years. But looking back now, I learned a massive amount just from being in the room. I’m more philosophical about it today.” After some success as a scriptwriter on Cold Feet , he had two shows cancelled and, spurred on by rejection, at 37 wrote his first novel.

A kind of fame arrived in 2009 when One Day , his third novel, which meets Emma and Dexter on the same day over 20 years, was suddenly responsible for millions of people weeping on hundreds of trains. Does Nicholls feel defined by it? “It would be an absurd thing to complain about,” he says, carefully. “I’ve been very lucky with it, but when people say, ‘I enjoyed your book’, I know they’re not talking about Us or Sweet Sorrow . And at the same time, I do think everything I’ve written since One Day is better! But sometimes there’s an extra ingredient in a story that you have no control over.” A whole new generation has now been gorgeously, horribly moved by the story all over again, thanks to the Netflix adaptation written with Nicole Taylor .

“I started writing the book 17 years ago, when I was in my 40s, so it’s a bit like looking at an old photo of yourself – you can still feel fond of that person, and yet, it’s very much someone else.” When the book was reissued was he tempted to go back and do an edit? “Yes! With every book! Maybe I will one day. But it would be like airbrushing old photographs, wouldn’t it?”

He is uncomfortable even with the gentle celebrity that comes with being an author whose name is a kind of shorthand for complicated love, and rather than discuss his family or politics, online he uses his social media mainly to promote other authors. “I wonder,” he says carefully, “if it’s better not to know too much about what a novelist feels?” Those who read his novels should be able to divine his politics, he says, but if he were to speak directly to something, he would focus on education. “I get very angry about that. Libraries closing, the way the arts are not accessible. That kind of thing makes me really furious.” He doesn’t mention, though I discover it later, that he established a bursary to support theatre students at the University of Bristol, regardless of their financial circumstances. “I have personal experience of what an education can give you and I get angry when it comes under attack. It changed my life – being paid to go to university and having access to public libraries and local theatres. And I find the way that that’s been taken away from people like me at that age to be enraging. Going to university specifically to study something that isn’t vocational was absolutely life-changing.” Where is he leaning, politically, today? “Well, none of the political parties are suggesting a return to student grants or means-tested bursaries. And if they did, then that would be a factor in my support.” But, he smiles, a little tightly maybe, “I do feel excited at the prospect of a change of government”.

The first review for Sweet Sorrow , he remembers, “was a real massacre. Really spiteful and mean. But what it said,” what stuck, “was that all of the books were about nostalgia.” Sweet Sorrow was set in 1997. One Day begins in 1988. “ Starter for Ten is a 1985 nostalgia-fest. Even Us , which was a contemporary novel, had flashbacks in it. And I was aware that a lot of what I was writing was about the gap between then and now, which I suppose is another name for nostalgia. A kind of… sense of regret,” he says, a little wistfully, “things going wrong in the past having an impact in the present, or a longing for the past.”

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The review weighed on him. So when he sat down to write this book, “I thought, ‘You must set it here and now’.” You Are Here sees two people entering middle age, both disillusioned by love and both balancing the joys of solitude with a fear of loneliness. “It comes out of the feeling of leaving lockdown. That self-consciousness and awkwardness and tenseness that we have, and the way that we all questioned things, like the value of friendship. What had we lost?” Though this book is very funny, there is also that aching thread of melancholy, the stuff of Nicholls’s long cold walks. “Even in the funnier books that I’ve written, there are quite bleak moments. There’s a particular kind of comedy that’s just joyous and lighthearted. And I’m not sure I can do that.”

What does melancholy mean, to him? “There’s a kind of ruminative aspect to melancholy, a kind of self-reflexive, thoughtful quality to it. It’s maybe gentler than sadness, and there’s a kind of perverse joy to it, too. A weird, strange kind of pleasure in it, isn’t there?” He’s talking about the secret to his work, the sour that spikes the sweet. Is that why he seeks it out, slipping into his specialist socks, stepping out with his waterproof notebook? “This is really unhealthy for me,” he says, with implied apology, “but I don’t have an answer. When you’re an adolescent that whole business of being mysterious and solitary is very self-conscious, and I don’t think I’m particularly like that. I’m quite sociable, but I’ve always definitely slipped into quite long periods of sadness and anxiety.” He pauses. “This is a book about loneliness and I didn’t have to think very hard about what that’s like.”

He says this is a book about loneliness, but it is also about the pleasure one can find in being alone, an unusual theme for a love story. “I didn’t want it to be too downbeat about solitude or loneliness. Often in a romantic comedy, the temptation is to make the state of being by oneself just awful, something that you have to escape, just the worst possible set of circumstances.” But both Marnie and Michael find comfort and pleasure in their own company before they fall in love, which somehow feels faintly radical. “I didn’t want it to be one of those books where being by yourself is pure hell. Sometimes it is for them, but for a lot of the time, they’ve managed to have quite rich, satisfying lives that just don’t get romantically involved with other people.” Which, when reading, feels exciting, especially from someone who has come to define romance. “I’ve never been able to write a happy ending,” he says, but admits this is the closest he’s come.

When Sweet Sorrow came out, a journalist asked him what he’d like to do next, “and I said, ‘I’d love to do a very classic, contemporary love story.’ And they said, ‘Aren’t you a bit old for that?’” He chuckles and swallows a forkful of pasta before adding, “looking back, I think maybe they had a point!” He loved seeing the musical adaptation of Starter for Ten , but found it “very strange. There are things I’d written where I thought, where did that come from?” Like what? “There’s quite a moony-eyed love story, a lot of yearning from a distance.” It was interesting, then, for him to watch the musical one week, then start press for You Are Here the next. “Which is about love at a different stage of life. It’s much more thoughtful and gentle, a bit more grounded. A love story that is about experience.” He realised he has been writing about each stage of love as he passed them, from Sweet Sorrow , which is about being 16, and reaching, and dreaming, to Us , which is about facing divorce at 58. “It’s interesting to me that love is a different thing at every stage of your life. And the notion of love [in Starter for Ten ] is to me now almost unrecognisable as love. It’s something else, to do with books and records and lust. It’s a strange kind of cocktail of what it’s like to be 18. Whereas Douglas’s sense of love in Us is much more mellow and poignant, and urgent in a different way.” Nicholls has come to understand that he’s interested “in the way in which love changes, depending on age and circumstance.” And looking at his body of work as a whole, “ I think the books are all about this great gulf between how love is portrayed for each of those characters, and how love feels for each of those characters.” But something new is coming. He is planning to concentrate more on film-making before settling down for his next novel. And, “next time, I don’t think I’ll write another love story”. I wonder, briefly, how we will cope. We’ll be fine, I say brightly. We’ll be fine!

He’s discovered how love changes with age – I wonder how he thinks love itself has changed since he started writing. “What the internet means for romantic relationships is completely inconceivable to me,” he says, wide-eyed as we share dessert. “But I do think there is more to it. When I think back to being 16 or 17, relationships were like a school disco with the boys on one side and the girls on the other. No one really said what they felt. I see less of that in my children’s lives. There’s a frankness now that is more healthy.” People of all ages have become, he says, much more clear about what they want, and how they feel. “My son always signs off his phone calls with love. It’s a very particular meaning of the word,” he says, smiling as only someone who has rewritten this emotion in ways that have helped a generation define it for themselves can, “but – I like to hear it.”

You Are Here by David Nicholls is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 23 April at £20 ( Guardian Bookshop £17.60)

• David Nicholls
• The Observer

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Why a Soldier?: A Signal Corpsman's Tour from Vietnam to the Moscow Hot Line Paperback – October 31, 2000

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Ballantine Books
• Publication date October 31, 2000
• Dimensions 4.25 x 1.25 x 7 inches
• ISBN-10 0804119384
• ISBN-13 978-0804119382
• See all details

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From the inside flap, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books; 1st edition (October 31, 2000)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0804119384
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0804119382
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.25 x 1.25 x 7 inches

About the author

David fitz-enz.

A regular army officer for thirty years, paratrooper & aviator in Vietnam as a combat photography platoon leader173rd Airborne Infantry and later Communications Officer 1/10 Calvary, 4th infantry Div. Among decorations is the Soldiers' Medal for life saving, the Bronze Star for Valor, 4 oak leaf clusters and Air Medal for sustained aerial combat. Brigade commander 1101st Signal which operated the Moscow Hotline for three presidents, Inspector General, Communications officer General Haig's airborne command post, Army War College graduate, Chief of Staff Defense Communications Agency, & special assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

Author of 'Why A Soldier", memoir of a combat photographer, 'The Final Invasion' winner of the Distinguished Writing Prize, Army Historical Foundation, & the Military Order of Saint Louis, Knights Templar, Priory of St. Patrick, Manhattan, 'Old Ironsides, Eagle of the Sea', the novel 'Redcoats Revenge, and "Hacks, Sycophants, Adventurers & Heroes, Madison's commanders in the War of 1812'.

I am a guest lecturer at the National Army Museum, London England, the Library of Congress and the National Archives, heard on "Here & Now" WGBH Boston, and appeared four times on C-Span Book TV.

Presently writing a spy thriller on WW I & II.

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