One Day

One chapter per year, each on St Swithin's Day, following Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew from 1988 onward. Everything between the dates is inferred from the gaps.

The constraint is the whole design. The reader arrives each year to find things changed and has to reconstruct how, which reproduces the experience of a friendship maintained across distance.

You only ever see one day a year, and the reconstruction is what the book is doing to you.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Emma is clever, principled and stuck in jobs beneath her. Dexter is charming, privileged and drifts into television and then into decline. Their trajectories cross in the middle of the book, which is the point of the design.

Nicholls is sharp about class and about the particular waste of the early-nineties graduate with no plan, and the period detail is precise without being nostalgic.

The annual snapshot format means every chapter has to establish a whole year in a scene, which forces economy and produces the book's best writing.

It is also very funny for long stretches, which is what earns the turn it takes. The comedy is not decoration; it is the reason the later material lands.

The comedy is load-bearing. Without twenty years of it, the ending would be sentiment.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

There is a development late in the book that divides readers permanently — some consider it the honest choice, others a manipulation. It is worth approaching unspoiled.

Two screen adaptations exist. The novel's structure is the thing the adaptations find hardest, and it is the reason to read it rather than watch.

The novel visits the same calendar date once a year for twenty years, and the constraint is the whole design: everything that matters happens between chapters and arrives as consequence. The reader assembles two lives from twenty annual samples, which is both the trick and the emotional mechanism.

You only ever see one day a year. Everything that matters happens in the gaps.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Both characters spend most of the book failing: Emma in a Mexican restaurant and then a mediocre teaching job, Dexter in a television career built on being briefly fashionable and then not. Nicholls is unusually good on the long middle stretch in which nothing works out.

The extended sequence covering his drinking, his genuine awfulness as a television presenter, and one particular visit to his dying mother while he is still drunk from the night before is the best writing in the book and by some distance the hardest to read. Nicholls fully commits to making a charming character actively unlikeable for a sustained stretch rather than merely gesturing at a bad patch.

The twenty-year span is tracked through carefully chosen specifics: answering machines and landlines, Edinburgh on graduation night in 1988, the particular texture of nineties television and magazine jobs, the clothes and the music and what things cost. The accumulation quietly does the work of a social history of a generation running alongside the romance, and it is a large part of why the book endures.

Roughly four-fifths of the way through, the novel makes a decision that many readers experience as a betrayal and others as the thing that lifts it above its genre. It is not disclosed here; readers should know only that the book is constructed to earn it and that opinion remains divided.

Emma is written with a degree of authorial condescension about her taste and her politics that has aged less well than the rest, and the book's treatment of her is noticeably less generous than its treatment of Dexter. It is worth noticing while reading rather than afterwards.