[I am reading this 2024 novel in three sections, writing about each one before reading on. So far I have read one section. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
2 April 2026
Part 1, Home and Part 2, The Lakes, Days 1-2 (of four)
The scaffolding for David Nicholls’ latest boy-meets-girl romance is walking the Coast-to-Coast footpath in the north of England, and this time he’s using the plot of two people who a) each pretend that enforced solitude is the best thing for them after failed marriages and b) each at first thinks the other is faintly absurd. Her marriage was bad, but he suffered a breakdown and now seeks solace in long mountain walks at weekends. She loves London, and can’t quite believe that anywhere really exists outside the city. He lives in the north of England and regards Londoners with a kind of pity. Especially the sort of Londoner you can spot a mile off in the countryside, with their new boots and waterproofs, and no understanding of how to pack and wear a rucksack. When they both get off the train at St Bees, guess who he spots a mile off. Or, rather, blocking his way at the exit. How we laughed.
Nicholls is massively popular… but I came to this convinced I wouldn’t like it. I’ve only read one of his novels, One Day, and I really didn’t like it. The novel has a brilliant hook, of course, the outlandish idea of a should-have-been couple somehow not getting together on Day 1, and meeting every year on the same day until… well, you’ll just have to read it. But I hated the implausible details of the characters’ lives—and there’s the most arbitrary plot fracture near the end that left me irritated by Nicholls’ lack of imagination.
And while I’m here I might as well take care of my other gripe, the romcom style. I don’t know how many times during Marnie’s chapters—the chapters alternate between her point of view and Michael’s, the other lost soul—I thought of Bridget Jones. We’re going back a lot of years now, almost as far back as Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill and the rest. I suppose the point of those movies is to give us what we expect, right down to the plot twists that carry the unlikely romance to its conclusion. And all those recognisable details about the mistakes they make are there to reassure us and lend an air of plausibility. Haven’t we all done things this stupid?
Enough complaining. I was glad to realise that before the end of Day 2 I was finding Marnie, especially, quite engaging. She thinks she’s going to hate this trip, a three-day hike for goodness’ sake, but she’s the only non-hiker who hasn’t given up and taken a taxi to the next hotel. Michael is mortified at first that she didn’t go with them, but by the end of the day… I’ll tell you later. I’ve paused at the point when the little group brought together by a mutual friend of Marnie and Michael’s is about to finally shrink down from the original five people to one, Michael. There was supposed to have been a sixth, a possible match for him, but she had cried off the day before. It means that Michael, the only seasoned walker among them, has finally got what he thinks he wants, the Coast-to-Coast walk on his own.
He had expected to have to put up with the others for three days, but Day 2’s dreadful weather means all the others have dropped has proved too much. Or so he thinks…. Nicholls makes it easy for us to guess that Marnie isn’t going to drop out after all, a combination of her unwillingness to throw good money after bad—the cost of the taxi and a new rail ticket won’t be easy to afford—and the spark of interest she feels in the highly self-contained Michael. And, of course, there’s a map of the entire Coast-to-Coast route on the page before the epigraph to Part 1. Can there be anyone who doesn’t know that Marnie will be waiting for poor Michael as Day 3 begins?
(Spoiler—or not a spoiler at all, because we know it’s coming—at the end of Michael’s chapter on Day 3, a few miles into his day’s walk to Glenridding, he spies Marnie up ahead. I peeked, but I read no further than that. She must have got up early with Cleo and her son, decided she wasn’t going to go back with them after all, and set off.)
One difference between the unlikely pair is that Marnie works entirely at home in her job and hardly ever goes out, whereas Michael is a secondary school teacher who has to talk to a hundred or more people a day. She is a copy editor, reading first- or second-draft manuscripts for novels and adding her suggestions for changes. It just about pays the bills, but after the Covid lockdowns she found it easy not to get back into the social life she had known before. Like Bridget Jones and xxx in One Day, she’s vaguely irritated not so much by her friends’ marriages, but their presumption that any childless woman of her age must want children. She doesn’t, or pretends to believe and accept that she’s too late anyway. (She’s 38.) She doesn’t want to spend her free time with people whose conversation has shrunk, mainly, to the subject of how their kids are getting on. It’s not that they’re insensitive—they don’t crow about it—but evenings with parents aren’t necessarily a lot of fun.
Meanwhile, Michael’s working days are full of other people’s children. What’s a would-be recluse to do? Two things. Those solitary hikes every weekend and holiday, when he can pretend that this is what he wants more than anything else. And, when he is with people—not just his students—he keeps things safe by sticking to what he’s most at ease with. Physical geography. He’s a great walking companion if you like that sort of thing… but if you don’t, not so much. Tessa, the woman chosen by Cleo as a possible match for him would probably have been no more interested than all the others are. She’s a fitness fanatic—but she wasn’t racing to join them.
We can see the romcom tropes, obviously, because Nicholls is making them so clear. We know the rules of the game, and we’re looking forward to seeing how ingenious he can be in bringing his mismatched pair together. But we also wonder what Nicholls might have up his sleeve to trip us up. Did the couple in One Day live happily ever after? I’m not saying… but will Marnie and Michael? Yes, surely… or surely not? Their coming together despite obstacles is going to be a big part of the entertainment value… but I’m sure that’s just the start, and that Nicholls is going to keep us guessing about how it will actually end.
The set-up, a three-day forced hike of the first 40-odd miles of the Coast-to-Coast footpath, is as transparent (and unlikely) a McGuffin as you are likely to see. As is Cleo’s plan to get Michael possibly paired off with her friend, and Marnie with the super-handsome Conrad. I’m guessing that Conrad is on the market because he’s so self-centred and dull any woman soon gets sick of him—but this doesn’t stop Marnie drooling at the sight of him. After dinner and drinks in the hotel on the first night she goes back to his room, and… nothing. He seems not to know that it’s fairly important to take an interest in the woman you think you might feel like seducing, and she decides to go back to her own room. And, it seems, he never intended to do more than a single day of the hike anyway. He opts out of the second day, and says he’ll meet them at the next hotel. When Marnie arrives there in the late afternoon—she’d caught a bus for the last mile or so—he’s about to drive back to London. He shares phone numbers with Marnie, but she thinks he’s probably just being polite.
So then there were four—Cleo, outgoing and a successful deputy head at Michael’s school in the north of England, her son Anthony, not even pretending to be interested, and our two would-be recluses. Obviously, neither of them has actually chosen to be reclusive, but circumstances, low self-esteem and an expectation of failure have made them both tend to shun the company of other people. Cleo is exasperated that Marnie keeps finding excuses not to come to get-togethers in the north of England… while Michael pretends he needs long walks on his own to find the headspace to let him think things through. It hasn’t worked yet, but, surely, the Coast-to-Coast will do it for him? Yeh, sure.
These two don’t know each other yet, so they don’t know how similar David Nicholls has made them. Right from her first chapter, Marnie acknowledges her plight for what it is. ‘I, Marnie Walsh, aged thirty-eight, of Herne Hill, London, am lonely. / This was not seclusion or solitude or aloneness, this was the real thing, and the realisation came with shame, because if popularity was the reward for being smart, cool, attractive, successful, then what did loneliness signify?’ Meanwhile, Michael doesn’t seem to have acknowledged it yet. He isn’t actually divorced, and seems to hope there’s a chance he and his wife Natasha will be reconciled. Nobody else thinks so, including the reader. But he’s convinced himself that once he’s thought it through, once he’s walked his way to real awareness… what? Who knows? He certainly doesn’t.
Anything else? At first, Nicholls doesn’t let any opportunity pass for one or the other of them to find something not quite right about the other. Michael’s body language is plainly telling everybody, including Marnie, that he’s perfectly OK without them. He’s not being rude, he hopes, and anyway Marnie just wants to carry on trying to be sociable with the others. But we know that when Cleo and Anthony give up the walk on Day 2, Marnie’s decision to carry on is David Mitchell’s signal to us that the game is under way. Of course, Marnie tells herself she just wants to make good use of all the expensive gear she’s wearing. If she noticves the disappointment in Michael’s face when she tells him, nobody’s saying anything. But, at first, he isn’t pleased that he’ll have to be civil to her for the whole day now.
It was around this point that I grudgingly started to accept that Nicholls is good at this. He knows exactly how to make these two gradually start to see one another differently. It’s a drip-drip approach, and I’m not talking about their soaked gear. In tiny steps, he makes something start to form. It’s to do with how, from a position of resentment on his part and stubborn doggedness on hers, they begin to engage with each other on what turns into a frankly awful hike. Neither Michael’s trusty outdoor gear nor her expensive but hasty purchases in some London outdoor shop are a match for the weather—and the fact that the discomfort is shared definitely helps. But so does something else they have in common, their ability to just get along with people and be at ease with the usual banter between their sort of friends. It’s both mocking and self-mocking, and it’s what gets them to start to relax.
Their walk only takes up a few short chapters, a dozen or so pages in all. But the banter starts early, a gentle mockery that is a kind of flirtation. ‘Classic ribbon lake,’ says Michael. ‘I thought so too,’ she replies. ‘Classic.’ They walk on, and he turns the mockery against himself. ‘Sorry, it slips out sometimes. The geography. Like wind.’ And she laughs. And however rocky, in a very literal way, the way ahead might be, it’s another step. She probably knows it better than he does, but with this tiny exchange something has subtly changed. All they need to seal it with is an almost unbearably arduous climb, both of them drenched, and both of them swearing (Marnie far more—and making blood-curdling remarks about how she feels about both Michael and Alfred bloody Wainwright, the author of all her woes).
The great thing about a dreadful hike is that it makes each of them see the vulnerability of the other. Not social ineptness or neediness, just simple human fragility. And she might complain all she likes about his pretending the next bit will be easier, it’s clear he’s out of his depth and only doing his best. They reach the top of the mountain, after several of those annoying Lake District moments when you realise you’re not actually there yet, and there are still two hours to go. But, eventually, they are down to a surfaced road and she feels a genuine sense of relief. A bus approaches—and she flags it down. When she’s on, he can’t read the message she scrawls in the condensation on the window…
…but it means she’s at the hotel before he is, and Nicholls can spend time on their separate thoughts. She is on her way to a hot tub with Cleo by the time he’s got back, and she’s had time to think. She tells him she doesn’t hate him, a huge concession, but he’s distracted by a pleasant enough text he hadn’t picked up from Natasha, the wife he hasn’t heard from in months. Cleo has told her that Michael is doing the Coast-to-Coast, and knows Natasha now lives near the route. Will she expect him to call on her, just to be friendly? Is this an embryonic future plot complication? And later, after he and Marnie haven’t been long in the bar alone, getting on in that warily amicable way we recognise now, Cleo and Anthony arrive. And later, during a post-mortem of the trip, a) Marnie tells Cleo she’ll drive back with her and Anthony early next day and b) she asks all about Michael. What’s he like, really?
‘We actually get along quite well. He’s funny, isn’t he? He has a sense of humour?’ ‘He’s … wry.’ ‘Wry. Well, wry’s good, I can work with that.’ ‘Great. Well, go for it! Dive in!’ ‘I’m not going to “dive in”! I just wanted to check, is there anything … wrong?’ ‘No!’ said Cleo. ‘I really don’t think there is,’ and Marnie was reassured, though she wished it had been said with more conviction.
This is why we know she won’t be leaving next day. And why nothing is at all certain—Nicholls throws in as many reasons for the whole thing to fail as for it to succeed.
We can read it for you wholesale 