David Nicholls enjoys a bit of structural scaffolding. In his debut, 2003’s student romance Starter for Ten, it is the TV quiz University Challenge. A European Interrail itinerary forms a backdrop to empty-nester marital crisis in Us, and the love story One Day, which has sold more than 5m copies and is now a global Netflix hit, is made up of 20 years of St Swithin’s Days. His sixth novel, You Are Here, is pinned to geographical locations: a well-planned hike through the Lake District, where route-specific section headings – “Day One: St Bees to Ennerdale Bridge”, “Day Two: Ennerdale Bridge to Borrowdale” – map out another ferociously likable romance.
Michael, 42, a bearded geography teacher from York, is walking 200 miles across Britain in order not to think about his recent divorce. His concerned friend Cleo gathers a small party to accompany him for the first few days, including her old friend Marnie, 38, a copy editor, also divorced, living in Herne Hill. Marnie’s friends have all married and moved out of London. Working from home, she is seriously isolated, bantering with household objects or “listlessly foraging on social media”. Loneliness brings shame, though, and when her TV’s streaming device produces a What a Year! slideshow from her photos involving closeups of ingrown hairs and dry-cleaning receipts, she forces herself to accept Cleo’s invitation as “the kind of potentially awful experience she needed”.
Matchmaker Cleo also invites a triathlete called Tess for Michael, and a handsome pharmacist, Conrad, for Marnie. But Tess cancels, as does Cleo’s husband, so the party consists of Cleo and her taciturn teenage son, with Marnie, Michael and Conrad. Distracted by Conrad’s looks, Marnie barely registers Michael’s solid appeal, despite neon signs flashing at the reader: “A low voice, slight accent, a jumper, beard and scruffy hair that might all have been home-knitted.” Kicking pebbles by a lake, just before they set off, he hands her a stone. “Nothing flash. Understated. Classic.” You’d think Cleo would have earmarked the incredibly decent nice guy rather than a vapid pharmacist for her best friend, but had she done so there would be no plot. Bright, bookish Marnie therefore initially pursues Conrad, who isn’t very smart and doesn’t like books, but loves Formula One. What follows, told in alternating narratives by Marnie and Michael, involves witty conversation, weather, overnight stops, mild drunken escapades and tugged heartstrings.
Nicholls knows how to make unpromising characters appealing. Michael is cut from the same sturdy cloth as Douglas, the biochemist narrator of Us. He is practical, witty, self-deprecating and liable to feel foolish. At one point, forced to eat alone in a romantic hotel, his “face set in the expression of someone who has tripped on a paving stone but is incorporating it into their walk”. Marnie, meanwhile, is doggedly relatable. Exhausted, flirting fiercely with Conrad, she wonders if it’s possible to “kittenishly throw up”. Backstories are gently woven: unremarkable childhoods, how their marriages fell apart, the arc of their careers. Then everyone else goes home, and we are left with Marnie, Michael, their growing sexual chemistry and Britain’s spectacular landscapes.
Nicholls’s novels often confound narrative expectations – most notably with the shock ending of One Day – but there are few surprises here. Short, pacy chapters are energised by a trail mix of jolly headings: in one section, playlist songs that Marnie and Michael share – “Don’t Speak by No Doubt (1996)”, “No Limit by 2 Unlimited (1992)”. Droll signposting aside, we are following the Jane Austen map of romantic plotting: two wounded but complementary souls, initial indifference, misdirected affections, growing attraction, misunderstandings, obstacles, hope and resolution.
In less expert hands this could feel almost absurdly formulaic. That it doesn’t is down to Nicholls’s extraordinary ability to capture the absurdity of modern life in pithy textural details. An inn where “real-ale drinkers snored and farted, fibreglass duvets billowing like sails”, has a shower like “a kettle poured onto the back of his neck”. A pillow is “filled with something fibrous, asbestos perhaps”; Michael’s hair has a “permanent exasperated air”. Almost every page contains these gems, and so the experience of reading involves endless nods of recognition that generate a tender, reassuring bond between author and reader. In the end, Nicholls’s novels all essentially say the same thing: yes, life is a bit cruel but it’s OK because we’re in this together. Bad things happen – people drop down dead in this book, too – but there are ancient rock formations, pubs serving fish and chips, and decent, plucky people falling in love in hiking boots. If You Are Here was an animal, it would be a mildly limping labrador: adorable, very British, poignant but plucky, and certain to heal.
Towards the end, Marnie tells Michael that Cleo warned her he was “wry”. “At least I wasn’t whimsical,” he says. The line between wry and whimsical can be perilous, but Nicholls stays on the right side. He is also a screenwriter, most recently with the adaptation of One Day, and it is skilful dialogue – Marnie and Michael communicate in witty Netflix-ready exchanges – that keeps everything on track.
There is satisfaction to be taken from this midlife redemption tale, not least because it fills a gap: Nicholls’s novels now cover love and marriage across every age bracket from teens to mid-50s. It may not be challenging – unlike Austen’s Persuasion, quoted in the epigraph, it offers neither visceral desperation nor pent-up agonies – but for many it will be a comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world, a crowd-pleaser and, surely, a TV hit-to-be.
• You Are Here by David Nicholls is published by Sceptre (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
