[I read this 2024 novel in three sections, writing about each one before reading on. It means I never knew what was coming next. 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 didn’t get on with it at all. That 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 end of that day, when the little group of five, brought together by a mutual friend of Marnie and Michael’s, is about to finally shrink down to Michael alone. 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 without the irritant of having other people tagging along.
He had expected to have to put up with the others for three days, but Day 2’s dreadful weather proved too much for all the others. Or so he thinks… but 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—there she is. I peeked, and she’d got up early and walked on ahead.)
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 both Bridget Jones and Emma 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 that at 38 she’s too late anyway. She doesn’t want to spend her free time with people whose conversation has shrunk, too often, 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 he 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, 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 that 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 get on the train and 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 how similar David Nicholls has made them. Right from her first chapter, long before the walk, 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 carries on trying to be sociable. 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 notices 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 day of hiking. 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.
Part 2, The Lakes, Days 3-4 and Part 3, The Dales, Day 5
This seems a good place to stop and speculate what might be about to happen. There’s more a sense of jeopardy than promise about the title of the first chapter in Day 6, The Watershed—things have been going so well for our two that I’m beginning to wonder what Nicholls is going to do to sabotage their chances. Each day, Marnie has been talking about getting the train next morning, and each day there’s enough to make her put it off. As she’d said at the end of Day 2, they actually get on quite well.
Somehow, I feel I’ve almost given enough of an impression of this novel to stop right here. David Nicholls does his thing really well and, surely, nobody’s going to get hurt. The characters are affable, the book is affable… I feel affable just reading it. We don’t know how things will work out in the end, but we’re already pretty sure they’ll be all right. Won’t they? All we can predict is that definitely, with 100 pages still left to read, there’ll have to be some suffering to go through. Haven’t things been going just a little too well up to now? The only thing that stops them finally coming together at the end of Day 5 is a laughable little plot twist we knew was coming. ‘No guests,’ the landlady had told Marnie—Nicholls needs to have his nearly lovers in separate accommodation for the joke to work—so, when the bed makes such a cacophony of grinding squeaks, we know nothing’s going to be consummated just yet. The landlady pushes a postcard of a pretty view under the door, and there it is, ‘written neatly in fat black pen – “No Guests After 10, Please!”’
So what’s happened on the walks, and in the hotels, that has led to this? Mostly self-conscious getting-to-know-you conversations at first, but soon they realise how comfortable they feel with one another. They have a very similar sense of humour—and sense of the ridiculous—and, inevitably, a mutual sense that they can be honest with one another. It’s a tricky line to tread. Marnie, in that self-deprecating way of hers, is more willing to be open about her own failures. Michael is more guarded, and we know something he never lets on about. He really, really hasn’t given up on the idea of a reconciliation with Natasha. OK, the text she had sent him on the second day was the first in four months, and had given him, and Nicholls, the chance to recap their sad little texting history before that. But Michael can’t help making one of his wry little private jokes to distance himself from the mix of emotions her text had caused him. ‘Hopeallswell,’ her hasty sign-off, could mean anything. He finds himself ‘sitting on the edge of the bed to read it again. Hopeallswell, like a village in the Dales. What was there to say in return?’
He never mentions it to Marnie, nor does he mention that Natasha lives close to the Coast-to-Coast footpath. He wonders why, guessing that she’d heard from Cleo that he’s doing the walk, she had texted him out of the blue. Does she want to see him? When I first wrote about it at the end of Day 2 I wondered if it would be ‘embryonic future plot complication.’ Of course it is, and it means that however well he’s getting on with Marnie, the idea of a possible conversation with Natasha after all this time is always at the back of his mind. He doesn’t immediately suggest it to her, telling himself she’s probably just being friendly. The break-up was never bitter, and they would no doubt have stayed together had it not been for his low sperm count…
…and this is Nicholls adding a lot of plausibility to his plot device. The more Michael doesn’t talk about it to Marnie, or make a definite suggestion to Natasha, the bigger it becomes in his mind. At the end of Day 3, he and Marnie have been making jokes about the honeymoon-type hotel Cleo must have booked as a joke… but she doesn’t come down to dinner. As he waits, suspecting Marnie’s had enough of him, his thoughts turn back to Natasha. He drafts a text: ‘All IS well. In fact I’ll be near you Friday.’ But Marnie finally arrives in the restaurant, and he puts his phone away. Her short nap had turned into a proper sleep—‘That’s drinking at lunchtime for you’—but now she’s here. And they get on so well as she eats what the waiter can offer after the kitchen’s closed that she agrees to another day’s walking. Her train is booked from exactly the place he’s aiming for, at exactly the time she’ll be able to get there. What are the chances?
Plenty, when Plotmeister Nicholls is on the case. And, to be honest, it’s all like this—which is what I meant when I said he’s good at it. Small jeopardies, friendly, affable solutions. But I’m repeating myself. After another couple of days like this, with near-misses like the time she mistakes his leaning towards her for the prelude to a kiss (he just wants to adjust those damned loose straps of hers), they finally reach the night of the creaky bed. And, another chance missed, there’s that watershed coming. Yes, we know it’s going to involve one of Michael’s geographical explanations… but we suspect something is about to happen to change things.
Part 3, The Dales (cont.), Part 4, The Moors, Part 5, Autumn—to the end
The Natasha plot device is really clever, and the set-piece scene it leads to seems to ruin everything. Nicholls’ intricate plotting, combined with his often pitch-perfect rendition of the speech and thought patterns of people like you and me, both go to make this a far more impressive read than One Day. All the rom-com rules are still firmly in place, but there’s genuine psychology here. The reasons why Michael makes one of the biggest mistakes of his life are made very plausible indeed. We know all about his insecurities, even after the near-consummation in the creaky bed, and that as long as there’s the tiniest hope of reconciliation with Natasha he’s going to cling on to it.
So how does it work? David Nicholls has to bring Natasha into Michael’s consciousness at the right moments. Like, at the end of Day 4, which hadn’t been as good as either of them had hoped—both their last chapters of the day open with the thought that it had been a mistake for Marnie to carry on—he phones his father. He had always adored Natasha and always finds ways to remind Michael how lovely she still is. And next day, songs on his playlist—Marnie has made them swap phones to hear one another’s—brings her up again. Natasha. It makes Marnie think about them as a couple, yes, including when they were making love. She needs to try harder to make things sexy again with him, and it works. It’s that night, after she’s decided against the train again, that they almost make it.
In the middle of that night in his own bed, he sees someone has sent a text message. Marnie, he hopes, then reads it. ‘Sure. I’d like that. Let’s make a plan.’ It’s from Natasha, of course, replying to his redrafted text, sent before the promise of the farcically creaky bed: ‘All IS well. In fact I’ll be near you Friday night if you want to meet.’ He thinks, ‘Possibly a mistake.’ Why? Because there seems to be every chance that Marnie will still be with him by then. It makes the next two days quietly stressful for both of them. In further tiny stages, Natasha’s friendly texts morph in his mind into something far more. He decides there’s every chance that she must be keen to meet him because things haven’t worked out for her with Frank, her new man, after all. This is where the psychology comes in. It becomes the most important thing in the world for him to be with her, alone—so, gradually, he starts to turn Marnie away from the idea of reaching the east coast with him.
She notices this, of course, and can’t work out why things between them seem strained. It’s because he hasn’t told her what he’s up to. If it ever had been possible for him to tell Marnie that Natasha lives nearby and that they planned to meet, it isn’t now. The natural thing would be for all three of them to meet, as friends, but that’s not what either of the women means for Michael now. He’s messed up badly—and Nicholls produces all the rom-com twists and unhappy chances you would hope for in the best farces. By early evening on the Friday, he has convinced Marnie to leave in time to get to London that night, although not immediately. She’s mooching around Richmond, which is where Michael has pointedly not invited her up to his hotel room, while he is making that same room into the perfect setting for a romantic reconciliation. There’s even champagne in an ice-bucket. Meanwhile Marnie gets on the train, wistfully thinking what might have been and wondering whether they’ll meet sometime soon.
Only kidding. Really, she’s bored of being on her own with the time dragging, so she decides to go to his hotel and surprise him—at exactly the moment, of course, when he’s expecting Natasha. He opens the door and, ridiculously, covers the lower part of his face with his hand. He’s only gone and shaved his beard off, and she’s immediately back to the usual banter. She launches straight into what she has to say—that she wants to cancel the taxi and walk the last 60 miles with him. He… is mortified. After maybe a minute or so, she realises he’s not playing along with her. And he keeps glancing down the corridor. She jokingly asks if he’s waiting for a call-girl, and he has to tell her. ‘I’m meeting Natasha.’ Ah. The next part of the conversation is torture. It’s Marnie’s chapter, and it ends after she asks him outright.
‘“But can I ask, do you still love her?” He had not always been honest with Marnie and it seemed important that he should be entirely honest now. “I do love her,” he said, “at this time and place.” And here she smiled, not pleasantly. “But, Michael,” she said, “that’s where we are.”’
Clever. But is it the end? By the end of that day it certainly seems to be, and not because Michael is back with Natasha. Did you guess? I didn’t. She’s come to tell him in person, much more considerate than a text or email, obviously, that she’s pregnant with Frank’s child. That’s what she always wanted, just as we (and Marnie) know that it’s what Michael always wanted as well. He’s told her on Day 6 or 7 just how hard it is, not only to be with people who have children—Marnie’s constant grumble—but to suffer what feels like their pity. And now, he thinks, he has nothing. Marnie’s gone for her taxi and will be on the train. Natasha has done the adult thing and told Michael all about moving on and staying friends. And after she’s gone, he looks for the champagne. He’d snatched the bottle from the ice-bucket and put somewhere warm before Natasha could see it. Can he even drag himself to the end of the walk after this?
He tries, spending an awful, featureless day on the worst part of the walk, and a sad little evening and night in an unprepossessing empty-nest house, mainly in the son’s old room, somewhere bleak. What is this, rom-tradge? After telling the novice landlord he can’t face going home and setting off on the trudge to the coast on his own, he comes back. He accepts the offer of a lift to the station after all. The end.
Only kidding again, because there’s Part 5 yet to come. Autumn. Which is… David Nicholls cleverly, as always, giving his poor, wounded readers a ray of hope. We hear that Marnie had met up with Conrad, at his instigation, and had quickly understood that he was on the rebound from a girlfriend he should never have split up with. She urges him to try and get back with the other woman… and is reconciled to the fact that she’s no worse off than she was before the ill-fated trip. Better off, because she’s rediscovered something of her old mojo. Her married friends find their kids aren’t so demanding of their time any more, and she can meet them as friends again. And she’s happier in her work, realising she’s good at it and that there may be a future in it.
And we hear that Michael gets on with his life, helped by Cleo who introduces him properly to Tessa. And yes, they do share interests—although, once they get together, he realises her idea of relaxation is pretty gruelling stuff. He likes her but, well, you know. In fact, they both know, and are both relieved that the other is ready to call it a day after a couple of months. And he—or is it Cleo?—thinks of a cunning ruse. Why not arrange a field trip to London? Why not casually mention the fact to Marnie, see if she’s interested in coffee, or something? And, reader, that’s what happens. For the first half an hour, maybe even an hour, they’re both awkward and wishing they hadn’t met again. And then they aren’t. Does it matter who is the first to open up about how they both still feel? Not really. But he mentions the possibility he’s always had in the back of his mind that they might do that last section of the walk together, from where he gave up.
And no, we don’t see them doing it, because she doesn’t promise to do any more than think about it. But she’s bought him a beautiful shirt as a present—they were always joking about the single dreadful shirt he’d worn for the whole walking trip—and we can imagine them there, dipping their boots in the North Sea. But all Michael can do now is watch her walking away, then get back to the kids and colleagues waiting for him.
We can read it for you wholesale 