If you are looking for a lovely, light and scintillating book, I can highly recommend You Are Here by David Nicholls. His name may sound familiar because he is the author of One Day, which is made into a very popular Netflix series. But don’t be fooled, You Are Here is nothing like the tragic One Day or any other love story because it is excitingly witty AND the two main characters are not young (relatively speaking). Michael is 42, bearded and a geography teacher from York. He plans to walk the 200 miles across Britain in order to distract himself from his recent divorce. Marnie, 38, is also divorced and lives a very isolated life as a copy editor in London. Through an unintended mishap by a matchmaking friend, Marnie and Michael end up together on this ten-day Coast to Coast walk. As a reader you know that they’ll probably get together in the end even if the characters are oblivious to their destiny. It’s an ancient story of how two unlikely people fall in love. With Nicholls’ clever writing skills it never gets ‘old’ because You Are Here is packed with beautiful observations, profound truths and humorous conversation. The story is told in alternating narratives by Marnie and Michael.
The Coast to Coast Walk is a real walk in Northern Britain and the author has tried to describe the landscape and route as accurately as possible. The chapters all start with a map of the route for the day. The hotels and pubs are fictional, so don’t go looking for them if you are trying to re-enact the book.
Sometimes, all we need is an uplifting book. A Guardian reviewer wrote: “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.” Hear! Hear!
