One Day (novel)

One Day is the third book by the English writer David Nicholls. The original edition was published in 2009 under the title One Day by Hodder & Stoughton, London. The German translation in 2010 from the publisher Kein & Aber published (ISBN 3036955429 ). In November 2011, the film version, whose screenplay Nicholls also wrote appeared.

Action

The book begins with the fact that Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew spend the night of July 15, 1988 after graduating from college in Edinburgh ( without each other to sleep ) before they go their separate ways again. Both are in their early twenties and are very different, yet they can not be forgotten, and although they lost during the next 16 years again and again out of sight, they always think of the other. Dexter stumbles into a career as a moderator to the fullest, going to parties, gets drunk and has fun. Emma, however, do not quite know what to do with their lives, trying out different jobs, writes books and always thinks back to Dexter.

You go on holiday together and think of a future together. But when Dexter is increasing his career to head, created a three-year break, during which they neither see nor hear each other. Eventually, they meet each other again at a wedding and they realize that they have missed each other. After they have finally come together and married Emma died on 15 July 2004 in a traffic accident. The novel ends on 15 July 2007 attended as Dexter with his daughter Jasmine and his new girlfriend Maddy Edinburgh and with a flashback to the first day of Emma and Dexter, which ends with an intimate kiss and forms the actual starting point of the story.

Style

During the twenty years in which makes this book, only July 15 is always described, but not in between the time. What happens in the time between these days, is mediated only by the thoughts and conversations of the people. On the days of the respective July 15, the author changes perspectives between the main characters Emma and Dexter.

Reviews

• Britta Jansen of Berlin literary criticism writes, among other things, the author would have a " made ​​witty and entertaining as well as melancholy novel. One Day " is much more than an entertaining romantic comedy about an unlikely pair. It is a bitter- sweet book about life as a series of missed opportunities .... "
• Marianne Weller Hoff writes at Spiegel Online: " " One Day "combines thoughtful the political with the private: such as the importance of class membership over the years waning, as media prominence defined a new upper class and that growing up also means from clichéd ideas to solve that one has of itself. "
• Tony Parsons: " One of the best love stories, in which every reader will immediately fall in love - and each author will want to have written it himself. "