I first heard about this book from the Calgary Herald and soon learned about the hype it got in England. Knowing little about the book, other than the fact that half of Europe was going crazy for it, I decided to pick it up and give it a shot.
The book is basically a journey through the lives of the two protagonists: Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew. They meet on July 15, 1988 on the day of their university graduation and end up spending the night together – your typical boy/girl romance; right? Wrong. Although Dexter considers Emma your typical teenage girl at first, having seen, “any number of bedrooms like this, dotted round the city like crime scenes, rooms where you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album,” it seems that Dex and Em are destined to be a pair. Emma begins as your average ‘80s Greenpeace hippie and Dexter your classic devil-may-care boy and so commences a story that follows these two very different people of the course of 20 years.
What really catches the reader’s attention is the style in which David Nicholls writes his book. Each chapter is a snapshot of a different year of these two characters’ lives and always on the same day, the anniversary of the day they first met – July 15 – also known as St. Swithin’s day in Europe. The reader follows Dexter and Emma all over the world (literally from Greece and India to Paris and other parts of Europe) through their own unique trials and tribulations and ever morphing relationship with each other from 1988-2007. This novel is classified as a love story but a painfully real one and is definitely not the book for you if you are simply looking for a ‘feel-good’ romance.
The character/dialogue driven novel is so much more than that, with laugh-out-loud funny parts as well the bawling-your-eyes-out sad ones; this book won’t disappoint. At the beginning of the book Dexter declares to Emma that if she’s still single by the time she’s 40, he’ll marry her. While I won’t spoil the ending for you, I can tell you that it’s a real shocker!
I was even more excited to find out that One Day has recently been turned into a film directed by Lone Scherfig, with Anne Hathaway playing Emma Morley and Jim Sturgess as Dexter Mayhew. The release date is in August and this movie is on my must-see list for sure. I would definitely recommend this read and in the meantime, I leave you with some of Emma’s philosophy: “Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance”