The premise of One Day is laid out in the title. The story starts with an apparent one night stand on St Swithins Day, in July 1988 in Edinburgh, and then revisits the characters on that day each year for twenty years. The reader sees their lives change and their relationship evolve through vignettes, without any other window into the events that shape them.
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Now there’s a big Twist(TM) towards the end of One Day that reveals why the story is told that way. I’m going to do my best not to spoil it for you, as it wasn’t spoiled for me before I read it, but the author David Nicholls doesn’t seem that concerned. After all, he’s made it pretty clear in interviews, talking about drawing inspiration from a particular passage in Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of Thee D’Urbervilles (which he also uses as an epigraph for Part 5 of the novel):
She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of the year;… her own birthday; and every other day individualised by incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?
Nicholls does a surprisingly good job of maintaining the through-line in One Day. I’d expected it to feel jerky going from year to year so quickly without the filler, with lots of clumsy exposition to show what’s happened in between, but he manages it relatively smoothly and without fuss.
The central characters are definite ‘types’ – Earnest Emma and Dapper Daxter – without descending into cliche. They experience a natural trajectory of growth and evolution over the years, to which the reader bears witness; again, it was a surprise and a relief to see that Nicholls didn’t have to stagnate their personalities to keep the thread strong through his strange timeline. The push-pull of their relationship to each other has strong Normal People vibes (if Sally Rooney didn’t use this book as inspiration, I’ll eat my hat). They get further and further away from each other, and just as you think all hope is lost…
… well, again, I can’t answer that without spoiling One Day for you. The ending is a huge bummer, I will say that much. HUGE. A critic for The London Paper summed it up well: “[One Day] may be a love story, but it’s no fairytale: Nicholls doesn’t shy away from the harsh side of growing up, the disillusionment, regrets, and random cruelty of life,”. That said, it’s also strangely funny. There were multiple moments that made me chortle, usually where the central characters ribbed each other in dialogue. So, I can confidently say that One Day will take you through the full range of human emotion.
In the end, it’s the conceit that makes this an interesting novel. An otherwise standard tragic love story is given an intriguing twist in its telling, and that’s the strongest thing to recommend. If you haven’t read it yet, I’d get on it quick before it’s totally spoiled for you – the fact that you and I have escaped spoilers until now is a miracle in and of itself.
Read One Day on audiobook via Libro.fm here.
My favourite Amazon reviews of One Day:
- “Should have dropped this book faster than Dex drops his seemingly thousands of lovers. Truly a sad waste of time. Both him, Emma and the book.” – North
- “The only nice thing to say about it were the very british sounding quips and replies to light up the depressing atmosphere of two unlikable persons making incomprehensibly stupid decisions for the lengthening of the story’s sake.” – Gisela Qasim
- “If these characters, all really caricatures, represent the British, no wonder they no longer have an empire!” – N&JM
- “The only reason I kept reading it was because I was hoping that the two main characters would get drunk and pass out in bed and their lit cigarettes would burn the house down and they would both be dead… I wrote a note in the cover that said “read at your own risk – this book sucks” and left it in an airport. I’ll probably be arrested for terrorism.” – K. Mag
June 13, 2025 at 3:40 AM
This is one of those rare books – a best selling contemporary novel that I actually enjoyed. Too often they are cliched or over-written. This hit the mark really well.
The film adaptation is good too but the series version was really lacking