So I first read One Day in October 2015 as part of my 52 book challenge that year. I loved it. I can still remember bits from the novel almost 5 years on, not just the plot but the actual words in order. I can also still remember the text I got from my mother (I gave her the novel translated in Dutch for her birthday) when she'd finished it and was heart-broken in the same way I'd been. So with all this stay-at-home mayhem going on, I decided it was time for some rereading, and I picked One Day up again.
I still loved it. Even knowing what was going to happen, how everything was going to turn out, I loved the story, I loved the characters. Reading it again, I was struck by how cleverly the story turns in on itself, ending just where it began, a writer's trick I missed the first time around. Since finishing it, I've felt slightly sad, like the main characters are people I've come to know and spend part of my life with, and now they've somehow gone and all I have a memories. Bits of the story keep coming back to me, almost visually, as if I really was there and really did see it happen. Jonathan Coe says on the blurb: "You really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they've become as well known to you as your closest friends" and I couldn't agree more.
I also thought back of my own life 5 years ago and now, comparing the 29 year-old with the 34 year-old, wondering whether I identified more with the characters in the earlier part of the novel than in the second, as I did now. David Nicholls really knows how to write people, to put a person of a certain age and disposition on the page.
Plus, he is very very funny.
So if you haven't already, do read this novel. Ignore Sweet Sorrow, ignore Us, just read One Day.
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