Coming soon after the release of the Netflix version of One Day, David Nicholls’ latest novel is another bitter-sweet homage to skewed romance. While the lovers in One Day are divided by class and aspiration, in You Are Here it’s loneliness and previous heartbreak that get in the way. Marnie, a struggling freelance copywriter, is not at first impressed by Michael, a grumpy geography teacher.
She is a Londoner, living alone in a Herne Hill apartment; he lives in York, in the house that is a shell without his recently departed wife Natasha. Their bossy mutual friend Cleo, a deputy head teacher, organises a walking holiday on which she hopes to set them up with suitable people. These potential liaisons fail to materialise, so Marnie and Michael are thrown together.
Nicholls has an unerring ability to tap into the emotional zeitgeist, the competitiveness that fuels class unease (Starter for Ten), midlife marriage uncertainty (Us) and in this case, the sense of estrangement from community that has followed the pandemic. While Michael has the school, with its physical routines, lockdown has never really ended for Marnie. Working from home, she has no need for human interaction and sometimes feels that she is better off without it, “she no longer trusted her face to do the right thing, operating it manually, pulling levers, turning dials, for fear that she might laugh at someone’s tragedy or grimace at their joke”.
So she cancels meet-ups, friendships falter. For his part,.
