British novelist David Nicholls has written four of my favourite “romances”. (I don’t know, can I even call them that?) Nicholls got his start as an actor before turning his hand to screenwriting and finally to novels.
You can listen to him talk about some of his work here:
My first experience with Nicholls was his book One Day, which we read for my book club back in 2011. I said that Emma and Dexter were “beautifully realized characters, flawed and heartbreakingly fragile.” Although there was a movie, I didn’t watch it. I did, however, watch the limited series starring Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod and it is EVERYTHING!
It only took that one book for Nicholls to become an auto buy author for me, and since then I have read three more of his books.
Sweet Sorrow – “Nicholls has written a book that is both laugh-out-loud funny and also deeply moving. How we ever survive those fraught teen years, I’ll never know, but somehow we do. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the book to mature teens in my class, but this is not a YA novel. The tears I shed at the end of the book came from understanding something I could never really know at sixteen: that first love doesn’t last, but it stays with you forever anyway.”
Us – Us is funny (although there were instances when I felt it was trying just a tad too hard to get a laugh), and well-written. I loved visiting these European cities. The characters felt like real people.
You Are Here – Trust me, it’s the journey not the destination that matters in this one. It’s filled with flirty banter, heartfelt revelations, and beautiful descriptions of the English countryside. This book will make you want to plan your own ramble and open yourself up to the possibility of love.
As a woman of a certain age, I appreciate that Nicholls writes characters with a little mileage on them (even when the book contains a backwards glance). His books make me laugh and cry, two things that make them automatic five star reads for me.
There are two Nicholls books I haven’t read yet: Starter for Ten and The Understudy. They are his first and second books, so I am not sure he had quite hit his stride, but I am more than willing to give them a go when I get my hands on them.
