One Day author David Nicholls on hiking and music in new middle-aged romance You Are Here

SINGAPORE – One might be forgiven for an intrusive curiosity about David Nicholls’ love life.

The British author is, after all, best known for his heartbreakingly tragic One Day (2009), superbly adapted by Netflix in 2024 and for which he was the executive producer.

The 57-year-old, however, is quick to shut down any suggestions that his own experience of love has been anything but undramatic.

“I won’t describe it as smooth-sailing, but I’m very lucky,” Nicholls says of his marriage to spouse Hanna Nicholls. “I’ve been in the same relationship for coming up to 20 years now. I haven’t been on a date since 1997.”

Despite this, the theatre-trained writer has authored such paeans to love as Us (2014), Sweet Sorrow (2019) and, of course, the best-selling One Day, which traces the relationship of two friends who spend a night together over 20 years of St Swithin’s Day, on July 15.

Its sprawling architecture was first condensed into a 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess – to mixed reception – before given a new lease of life by new faces Ambika Mod as Emma Morley and Leo Woodall as Dexter Mayhew.

Now, the author returns with You Are Here, a tale of two middle-aged loners unexpectedly thrown together in the windswept terrains of Northern England.

Michael and Marnie, both reeling from failed relationships on either side of 40, are invited by their mutual friend, Cleo, on a three-day hiking excursion.

For Michael, this is exactly “the kind of obsessive project that overtakes men in the middle of life, like marathon running or carpentry”.

Marnie prefers to view it through the lens of a Regency novel: “The etiquette of walking required that she spend time in conversation with each of the guests.”

Nicholls himself is no stranger to the more than 320km coast-to-coast walk from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire.

“Once or twice a year, I go on a walk by myself. It’s something I’ve done for 10 or more years now,” he says, though he clarifies that he usually does only sections of the trail due to time constraints. “I really love it. It’s a very important part of my writing.”

Someone suggested he convert this routine into a non-fiction account, but he decided to do one better, transposing a separate idea of two characters afflicted by urban loneliness in London into the countryside.

“It’s a love story that doesn’t take place in bars and restaurants. There’s something about the rhythms and the weight of romantic-comedy dialogue that we associate with the city, so I thought it was a nice contrast to dump them in the middle of the field,” he says.

Michael and Marnie, stuck in their ways and believing they already understand attraction, might have brushed each other off on a more conventional date.

“In the atmosphere created by the mud and the webs and the terrible puffs, there’s suddenly conflict, things to say, jokes to make.”

You Are Here, more than anything, is a humorous novel, filled with witty dialogue – one of the most memorable is Marnie creatively swearing at Michael during a particularly arduous climb.

Line for line, Nicholls believes it also contains the best prose he has ever written. Though at 80,000 words, it is shorter than One Day and Sweet Sorrow – 130,000 and 150,000 words respectively – he says he took a much longer time with You Are Here, agonising over each sentence.

He understands that that does not guarantee a better reception.

“There are other factors you can’t control. The kind of environment in which you publish a novel, for example, but you can make sure that the writing is as accurate and precise and as funny as possible,” he says.

Several chapter headings are song titles that Michael and Marnie exchange. Nicholls says music is “one of the first things we can offer up to each other”.

Without notes, he cites songs in the nostalgic One Day soundtrack that he selected himself, paired with the episodes in which they played. These are some of his favourite songs, including a Nico cover of These Days by The Velvet Underground; Show by Beth Gibbons and Paul Webb; Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine; and tracks by New Order and Cocteau Twins.

By contrast, the music in You Are Here is not necessarily songs that he loves, “because I wanted to stop pushing my favourite songs”.

“Music is the best way into emotion and into memory. It slams you back into time and place in a way that for me, as a writer, is very useful,” he says.

When he writes, Nicholls has found it helpful to visualise particular actors as his characters – an indication, perhaps, of his disposition now to write with one eye on a potential screen adaptation.

He demurs from disclosing who his inspirations for Michael and Marnie are – “I have to keep them secret” – but confirms that the faces change.

“I probably think of four or five or six, rather than just one. It’s useful to have an actor’s energy in mind: the rhythm of their speech, the tone of their voice or their physicality. It’s just about having a sense of movement and tone.”

This may be one of the last few novels Nicholls will write on love, as the author finds his attention gradually turning to family relationships and the experience of ageing.

He hopes it is a fair representation of middle-aged solitariness, which “might not necessarily be the worst thing in the world”.

“There are terrific pressures in the 30s and early 40s to have met someone, to have started a family. What happens if that doesn’t happen through no fault of your own?

“You are starting to think that that might be a permanent condition. How do you cope with that? I think that’s a very interesting state to be in.”