Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are, and the cursed hours between three and five on a February afternoon lasted forever, as did the same hours in the morning, times when she had nothing to contemplate but the same circling anxieties and regrets, times when she was forced to acknowledge the truth.

I, Marnie Walsh, aged thirty-eight, of Herne Hill, London, am lonely.

***
Like rivers, all jokes had to begin somewhere and he sometimes wondered who had started the notion that geography teachers were dull. Was it a book? A disgruntled kid? An embittered physics teacher? He would never dream of criticising a colleague’s discipline, but were the historians really so interesting, bouncing back and forth between the Tudors and the Weimar Republic?

David Nicholls, You Are Here (Sceptre, 2025), p. 5; p.8

I really love this book. This was my first David Nicholls (my first ‘real’ romance book as well) and it was so enjoyable. I’d watched the 2024 Netflix adaptation of One Day for the first time at the start of the year and had loved the story so when, at the end of August, I saw the name ‘David Nicholls’ displayed on a book in a shop in what to me was the middle of nowhere, I walked very quickly towards it. You Are Here tells the story of the relationship that blossoms between thirty-eight year old Marnie Walsh, a copy-editor and proofreader, and Michael Bradshaw, a forty-two year old Geography teacher and walking enthusiast, when their mutual friend Cleo invites them on a group walk that soon dwindles into a party of two when the other invitees leave for their various reasons. Cleo deems their attendance at said walk a matter of urgency because prior to it, in Cleo’s mind both Marnie and Michael are perilously close to forgetting entirely how to interact with another person. Marnie is a bitter divorcee who has taken to speaking to objects because the majority of her friends have either disappeared into their marriages over the years and she has lost the desire to maintain the ones she still has, and Michael is recently separated from his wife and has all but chosen to forego human contact outside of teaching his students and obligatory phone calls with his parents and Cleo who is both his friend and the headteacher at the school he works, a status which she uses to corner him into the walk. 

The walking party is comprised of Cleo and her teenage son Anthony (who both Marnie and Michael are godparents to), a quite unlikeable man called Conrad (intended by Cleo for Marnie), a woman called Tess who doesn’t show up (intended for Michael), and Marnie and Michael themselves. Michael, a lover of long solitary walks, intends to walk across the coast of England while the rest of the group have agreed to walk only a way before returning home. As the others gradually leave, Marnie finds herself joining Michael for the full Coast to Coast walk from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay.

The first thing I want to say is that if the humour in this book is indicative of his style as a whole, David Nicholls is a very funny man. The second is that I loved the fact that although the book is a romance, and seems to have been marketed as one, it didn’t feel like one as I was reading it because the love story that emerges between Marnie and Michael seemed secondary to the redevelopment of their personalities outside of their failed marriages and outside of being in a romantic relationship with another person. (If this is in fact like all romance novels and isn’t at all unheard of in the genre then excuse my ignorance, I don’t tend to read them.) When we first meet Michael and Marnie they’ve become so comfortable in their  isolation that they’re verging on being misanthropes, Michael especially, and by the end, they’re no longer just the remains of their broken marriages that they had been for so long before Cleo forced them out of their misery bubbles. 

The story is told through the conversations Michael and Marnie have as they walk together and through their private ruminations about themselves and each other when they retire to their rooms at whichever establishment they’re staying in each evening. There’s a really fun few chapters told through the songs that come up on their playlists when they hit shuffle — Marnie’s suggestion to make one particularly dreary walk less so. Naturally, they end up learning a lot about each other (about ex-spouses, about how they got into their professions, about their childhoods and their parents’ gravest failings) but in all of this Nicholls depicts with a lot of honesty how self-conscious a process this supposedly natural divulging of one’s self can be, especially in the case of those as wounded and out of practice at socialising as Marnie and Michael when we meet them.

Courtesy of Michael’s chosen profession, his love for long walks and the fact that the story takes place on several walks over the course of a few days, the story is peppered with geographical and historical trivia about rock formation and the mechanics of rivers and other things of that nature. These are things which I’m not the most interested in naturally, but I found myself actually engaged in these details while reading because of what a likeable and interesting character Michael is. Marnie, too, painfully awkward but determined to honour her resolve to “go outside” to fix her state of loneliness, is very likeable and is the character from whom much of the novel’s humour originates. 

The way Nicholls structured the book made it such an easy read and really made me feel like I was on the walk with Marnie and Michael. The book is separated into parts which are themselves separated into days of the walk (‘Day Two: Ennerdale Water to Borrowdale’, for example. Each day also features a fun map of the journey, which I really liked as a feature.) The chapters within those days alternate between Marnie and Michael’s perspective as the walk progresses and each day ends with the pair checking into an inn or a swanky hotel (and on one occasion, a very unsavoury establishment) for food and shelter for the evening. I enjoyed these scenes showing the transition from a day of walking to the warmth and cosiness of a country pub because I used to go walking in the Peak District when I was younger and I still remember the feeling of returning to ‘civilisation’ in the form of a pub and a portion of fish and chips after the wilderness of the unpredictable, and often very cold, outdoors. 

Some readers wouldn’t be unjustified in finding You are Here overly-sentimental because I think it is a little bit on the twee side but I didn’t find this to be a negative thing for the story. At the time I read it, that quality about it was something I actually really enjoyed. For those who prefer their novels laden with grief and sorrow, there is some mention of infertility as well as unrealised dreams of parenthood, which I thought Nicholls represented very tenderly in the context of the wider story. You Are Here tells a really heartwarming story in a really readable way so if you, like me, watched One Day at the start of the year and was ripped into pieces by the ending, this book has all the beauty of One Day without *that ending*.* 

*As well as writing the book, Nicholls also served as one of the Executive Producers for  the series and wrote the episode that launched a thousand Tiktoks (episode 13 for those who don’t know) so I think I can still, to some degree, call the Netflix series his work.

A Moment For the Dress…*

*some of my favourite lines from the book

City faded into suburb. She saw gasometers, horses in a stable-yard, dog walkers on a frosty recreation ground, articulated lorries on the ring roads, everyone going about their business, as in a Richard Scarry book. She’d become so used to the view from her kitchen table, the short lens of London life. Now England was a model village blown up to life size. Look, canal boats! A recycling plant! A wind-farm! Infrastructure, was that the word? The suburbs faded and stage swirls of mist lingered in then dips and hollows. Wild cows! She was observing the hell out of things, remembering the power of a train journey to turn life into montage, a sequence conveying change. Why hadn’t she done this before? What had she been so scared of? Would she care for anything on the trolley? She would care for everything.’

p. 30

She’d seen this film before, the one where the neurotic city slicker is initiated into the ways of the wild by the taciturn, hard-handed adventurer, initially appalled then charmed by his simple ways. She’d resist the cliche and show that she was just as steely, competent and capable as he was, which was exactly what happened in the movie, too.

p. 104

Running parallel to the reality of her marriage was a phantom version of her twenties in which she’d been more ambitious, studied, travelled, taken risks, said yes. When she thought of her younger self, which she did too often perhaps, she felt a sma;l part compassion but a larger part anger, as if she were banging on a thick glass wall. And yet to talk honestly about those regrets and humiliations to someone she barely knew would be awful, excruciating, like crying in a supermarket. No one wanted to be confronted with that much honesty on an afternoon’s walk, but to turn it into a tired anecdote was scarcely better.

p. 160