by Kat Musselwhite

Created on: October 30, 2010

Title: One Day

Author: David Nicholls

ISBN: 978-0-340-89698-3

Price: £7.99

Length: 435

Read this if you loved: Starter for Ten

‘One Day’ is the story of Dexter Mayhew, the handsome lower second degree playboy expected to be on his fourth wife by the age of 40 and Emma Morley, the type of first class degree girl, that Dexter expects to find the word “bourgeois” as a term of abuse… He’s probably right! Emma loves books and is constantly trying to educate him.

On the night of their Graduation, Emma and Dexter meet, but tomorrow they’ll be going down very different paths, into very different futures. What lies ahead of them? Neither of them knows. But, so begins the 20-year tale, of two people destined to be together, but somehow destined to be apart.

On first glance at this book, you don’t have to read a single page of the prose, to know that this is a highly regarded book, from the author of Starter for 10 (now a film, starring James McAvoy). With comments not only from the leading press (Mirror, Guardian etc), but also Nicholls’ own peers, including Jonathan Coe and Tony Parsons who both write similar culture-based literature.

But enough about that, what do I really think of the book?

Every so often, a book comes along that almost literally screams “classic”, and you know that it is going to resonate with certain generations, who will just sit back and relate to practically everything in the book.

That is exactly how I felt when reading this book.

Forget the fact that I was only four and a half when ‘One Day’ starts out, and I was only a kid throughout most of the rest of the book, there is still a huge amount of relatable content, which is incredibly unfortunate, as it makes me realise how much history really is repeating itself right now.

Here are two graduates, struggling to make that move into adulthood following Graduation, with big dreams and high expectations, all of which are painfully shattered, partially by a struggling economy and partially by their own false ideals of life. Both Emma and Dexter are facing unemployment, career disappointment and all the other crap that University will never prepare us for.

The book forces a huge nod of the head, when realising that life never, ever turns out the way we plan, and how easily it can spiral out of our own control, even when we’ve tried our hardest to achieve something.

Nicholls portrays Emma and Dexter in such a

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>