book review us by david nicholls

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‘Us,’ by David Nicholls

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By Jay McInerney

• Jan. 2, 2015

David Nicholls’s “Us,” which had yet to be published when it was selected for the longlist of the Man Booker prize last summer, was widely regarded as the judges’ nod to popular taste, a kind of token cute blonde candidate for an award often criticized as quirky and elitist. Nicholls’s previous novel was the best-selling “One Day,” which served as the basis for a movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. Like its predecessor, this new offering charts the path of an unlikely love affair over the course of decades.

Shortly before they are to embark on a summer trip to Europe, Douglas Petersen’s wife announces that she may be on the verge of leaving him. Douglas has imagined the trip he so meticulously planned as a kind of accelerated, low-­budget version of the Grand Tour, a chance to see the great monuments and museums of Europe with his family before his son leaves the nest for art school — an opportunity for bonding and education. Douglas is not the kind of guy who would undertake a trip to the Continent for its own sake. A 54-year-old biochemist of stolid disposition, he’s a reader of instruction manuals, a balancer of checkbooks, a maker of lists. He’s as British as Marmite, and I suspect his attractiveness to readers will be as polarized as reaction to that yeasty condiment. Making a to-do list for the trip, Douglas dutifully advises himself to “maintain a sense of fun and spontaneity.” Temperamentally, he’s the polar opposite of Dexter Mayhew, the handsome, feckless protagonist of “One Day.”

Like “One Day,” “Us” is the story of an odd couple, and here it’s Connie, the ­girlfriend/wife, who’s the wild, spontaneous, unconventional half of the sketch. When the couple meet, Connie is an aspiring painter with an interest in recreational drugs, though she eventually settles into marriage and motherhood. The novel is made up of two parallel narratives, chapters recounting Connie and Douglas’s courtship and eventual marriage alternating with chapters relating the family’s paint-by-numbers progress through Europe. On the train to France, Douglas tells us, “I handed out A4 polypropylene wallets containing itineraries for the North European leg of our trip; hotel addresses, phone numbers and train times; and a loose breakdown of events and activities.” The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Jardin du Luxembourg are dutifully ticked off, although Douglas’s son, Albie, a rebellious 17-year-old who’s openly hostile to the whole enterprise, does his best to sabotage the schedule.

Eventually, in Amsterdam, following the planned visit to the Rijksmuseum, Albie jumps ship after his father humiliates him, disappearing into the streets with an accordion-playing busker from New Zealand. Connie soon returns to England, while Douglas sticks to the itinerary, hoping the promise of prepaid hotel rooms will eventually entice his son to return to the program.

The two strands of narrative both address the same question in slightly different form: Why does Connie want to leave Douglas, and why the hell did she marry him in the first place? Curiously, though Douglas holds all the cards as the first-person narrator, he’s so self-deprecating that we can’t help sympathizing with his wife and son.

Nicholls wrings a certain amount of comedy out of Douglas’s hopeless squareness. “My wardrobe at that time ran the gamut from taupe to gray,” he tells us of the night he first met Connie, “all the colors of the lichen world, and it’s a safe bet that chinos were involved.” Douglas’s plodding empiricism and his self-­professed inability to appreciate art or literature result in some humorous passages, as in the chapter in which he recounts the history of art, as he sees it: “Cave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. . . . Some bright spark realized that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was very good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail.”

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by David Nicholls ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2014

Evocative of its European locales—London, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Madrid—and awkward family vacations everywhere, this is...

In his picaresque fourth novel, Nicholls ( One Day , 2010, etc.) artfully unveils 25 years of a couple's relationship.

Shortly before Douglas Petersen, his wife, Connie, and their 17-year-old son, Albie, are to take a “Grand Tour” of Europe, Connie makes a surprising announcement: She thinks their marriage “has run its course” and is thinking about leaving. Connie is panicked at the thought of Albie going to college at the end of summer, leaving her and Douglas alone in the house. Douglas, a straight-laced biochemist who “had skipped youth and leapt into middle age,” came along at a time when Connie, artistic and free-spirited but directionless, needed someone sensible. Despite the announcement, Connie still wants to take this holiday together, and as their journey begins, so does Douglas’ examination of his marriage. Part travelogue, part personal history, Douglas’ first-person narration intersperses humorous observations of their travels, during which Douglas usually finds himself out of step with his art-loving wife and son, with his wistful recounting of their back story, from his unlikely courtship to his recent positioning as a misfit in his family of three. After a ruinous morning in Amsterdam, when Albie unwisely confronts a trio of arms dealers and Douglas intervenes in a way that infuriates his family, Albie runs away, and the “Grand Tour,” deemed a failure, comes to an end. Yet before it’s too late, Douglas seizes a chance to find his son, win back the affections of his wife, and make this journey, both literal and figurative, a heroic one after all. Nicholls is a master of the braided narrative, weaving the past and present to create an intricate whole, one that is at times deceptively light and unexpectedly devastating. Though the narration is self-conscious at first, it gradually settles into a voice that is wistful, wry, bewildered and incisive, drawing a portrait of a man who has been out of his league for a long time.

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-06-236558-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by David Nicholls

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

THE PERFECT COUPLE

by Elin Hilderbrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018

Sink into this book like a hot, scented bath...a delicious, relaxing pleasure. And a clever whodunit at the same time.

A wedding on Nantucket is canceled when the bride finds her maid of honor floating facedown in the Atlantic on the morning of the big day.

One of the supporting characters in Hilderbrand's ( Winter Solstice , 2017, etc.) 21st Nantucket novel is Greer Garrison, the mother of the groom and a well-known novelist. Unfortunately, in addition to all the other hell about to break loose in Greer's life, she's gone off her game. Early in the book, a disappointed reader wonders if "the esteemed mystery writer, who is always named in the same breath as Sue Grafton and Louise Penny, is coasting now, in her middle age." In fact, Greer's latest manuscript is about to be rejected and sent back for a complete rewrite, with a deadline of two weeks. But wanna know who's most definitely not coasting? Elin Hilderbrand. Readers can open her latest with complete confidence that it will deliver everything we expect: terrific clothes and food, smart humor, fun plot, Nantucket atmosphere, connections to the characters of preceding novels, and warmth in relationships evoked so beautifully it gets you right there. Example: a tiny moment between the chief of police and his wife. It's very late in the book, and he still hasn't figured out what the hell happened to poor Merritt Monaco, the Instagram influencer and publicist for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Even though it's dinner time, he has to leave the "cold blue cans of Cisco beer in his fridge” and get back to work. " ‘I hate murder investigations,’ [his wife] says, lifting her face for a kiss. ‘But I love you.’ " You will feel that just as powerfully as you believe that Celeste Otis, the bride-to-be, would rather be anywhere on Earth than on the beautiful isle of Nantucket, marrying the handsome, kind, and utterly smitten Benji Winbury. In fact, she had a fully packed bag with her at the crack of dawn when she found her best friend's body.

Pub Date: June 19, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-37526-9

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

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Us review – David Nicholls's poignant tale of a marriage in crisis

W hen an acquaintance revealed recently that he'd married a woman he met by chance on a train, I said, "Very David Nicholls", to which he replied: "Yes, very. It wasn't until three years after that meeting that we actually got together."

The 47-year-old Nicholls has become one of the few authors whose name serves as conversational shorthand: in his case, for the ambushes of romance. In One Day , which is among the biggest-selling British novels of recent times, one-night lovers spend 20 years finding and losing each other, while in the TV two‑parter The 7:39 a male and female commuter argue on a train and almost destroy two relationships.

Us , for which readers and booksellers have waited with growing impatience in the five years since One Day , puts another couple to the test. One night, Douglas Petersen, a 54-year-old industrial biochemist, is woken by his art gallerist wife of almost a quarter of a century, Connie, and informed that she thinks their marriage may be over. This is bad news for Douglas – not only because he still loves Connie madly, but because they have recently booked an expensive grand tour of Europe as a final family holiday before Albie, their 18-year-old son, goes to college.

Luckily, continuing the way in which Nicholls' characters often have one eye on psychological plausibility and the other on narrative possibility, Connie agrees that the trip will go ahead anyway, with an announcement of her decision on divorce delivered (like Ant & Dec opening an envelope) when they get back. Inevitably, Doug, in the manner of an electioneering politician announcing that voters have four weeks to save the NHS, treats the holiday as a campaign to sway his wife's mind.

Whereas One Day mismatched a serious-minded woman with a hedonistic and libidinous man, Us  reverses the polarities. "Connie is late for flights, whereas I like to be there the requisite two hours before departure," notes Doug, amid a long riff on their differences, although, as he is privileged to be the book's only narrator, we are only ever getting his view of her. He admits, in his rather priggish tone, to being "not an especially passionate man", while Connie is a lover of culture who has done a lot of sex and drugs.

As in all Nicholls' work, for page or screen, his organisation of the story is impeccable, the structure consisting of 180 chapters with teasing lower-cased titles such as "the glitter wars" and "pompidou paris accordion cat amazing", which are then explained in the following section.

The narrative neatly weaves present and past with a perfect rhythmic sense of when to leave or to revisit a particular strand. The dialogue is always bouncy (even costive Doug is given some spicy one-liners) and there are some nice, Brysonish summaries of the towns and hotels the Petersens visit on their break.

And, although assumed to be a sentimental populist by those who have read about his success rather than reading his books, Nicholls is far more willing than the romcom film director Richard Curtis (to whom he's often compared) to challenge the genre's expectation of a happy ending. Us follows One Day , which was ultimately a sort of rom-trag, in admitting scenes and sentiments of unsettling bleakness.

His previous novel established Nicholls as a fiction writer of unusual popular appeal; he unexpectedly threatened to get through a heavily policed literary border control this summer when Us was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. It failed to make the shortlist, which feels like the right decision: while the new book deserves to match One Day 's sales, it doesn't make a case for the author joining the highest literary ranks.

What holds Nicholls back may be a fear of offending his wide readership. The books are acute and astute about the dynamics of relationships, noting in Us , for example, that when two people are trying to restore a damaged marriage, "pretending that nothing has changed is a change in itself". But, in stories that turn on sex and death, Nicholls is oddly puritanical about physical detail. The writer's work as a screenwriter is controlled by TV watersheds and cinematic age-certificates; it often feels as if he's also censoring his fiction. After a highly significant bedroom encounter, the narrator warns, "I won't go into the details", and also declines to describe a terrible event in his life on the grounds that "some things cannot be lived through twice".

Perhaps a man so decorous and private should not have been given hundreds of pages to tell his story. The sex scenes here have different contexts – seductive, conceptive, post-infidelity, pre-break-up – and it is frustrating to have all these encounters categorised as "fine". Us is very David Nicholls, but with the next novel he might usefully let himself go a bit more.

• David Nicholls

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Us by David Nicholls book review

One Day by David Nicholls is one of my favourite books of all time. I’d solidly say it’s my favourite “romance” book of all time. So when the stars aligned when I saw Us by him sitting on my parents’ bookshelf and then it became available to listen to via Libby, I knew it was time to read another of his.

Please note that this article contains affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase any products via the links below, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These affiliate links do not affect my final opinion of the product.

Us is Nicholls’ fourth novel, One Day being his third. Us focuses on the story of a dad, Douglas, and his story after his wife tells him she thinks she wants to leave him. He hopes a pre-arranged family trip around Europe will bring their marriage back on track. Along the way, memories of how Douglas and his wife got together and how their son came to be are fed through.

Us plot – 4.25/5

Us is a very down-to-earth story. Nothing mind-blowing or particularly exciting happens (other than some family dramas) but the way that Nicholls writes is so humorous and intelligent that it still remains incredibly engaging.

Something that Us tells me is that Nicholls is keen to tell everyday stories where not everything goes well. I don’t want to ruin the plot too much but this is a raw and emotional look into a difficult marriage. And, like One Day , a very mature and real look into it the fact that Nicholls has absolutely no interest in fairytale endings.

I appreciated this angle a lot. It’s so much harder to write a story about a group of people you genuinely like and not have everything turn out how you’d like than just easily round everything off with a happy ending.

So, despite the plot not racing along, Nicholls’ writing entwining humour and deep, dark stories mean I thoroughly enjoyed the story of Us.

Us characters – 4.75/5

David Nicholls knows how to write real human beings. First-person novels can often put me off as you really struggle to gauge any other characters in the book. However, Nicholls has an incredible talent for bringing real depth and character to these people.

Douglas, our main character is a very intelligent man who grew up with a strict father and so his approach to parenting and as a husband is deeply affected by these factors – meaning he’s resistant to modern ways of parenting and struggles to joke about things that require lowering his intelligence to laugh.

There’s also some small humour that’s ingrained throughout the story that, despite the sombre tone throughout, makes the whole thing feel a little less tense and also makes you feel far closer to the characters as adding humour to any book makes the people feel just a little bit more real.

Us final rating – 4.25/5

Us is the second book by David Nicholls I’ve read and I’d say I still preferred One Day. However, Us gives me confidence that Nicholls is an author whose writing and stories I will always thoroughly enjoy. Nicholls has a brilliant talent for incorporating gritty, down-to-earth stories into his novels. Us is another story that’ll make you feel incredibly connected to the main characters and also feel every emotion they feel and be vying for everything to work out for them at the end. If you enjoyed the writing style and storytelling technique of One Day , I’d say you’d enjoy Us too.

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BookBrowse Reviews Us by David Nicholls

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

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• First Published:
• Oct 28, 2014, 416 pages
• Jun 2015, 416 pages

• Romance/Love Stories
• Contemporary
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• Mid-Life Onwards
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A husband (and father) embarks on a process of self-evaluation when his marriage and family threaten to unravel.

After nearly thirty years of marriage, the middle-aged biochemist who narrates Us has learned a few things from his artist wife. One is that you should always carry a novel when you go on a journey. "In the early days of our relationship," he recalls, "I neglected to take a book on to the plane. It was not a mistake I would make again." His wife is startled by the lapse. "I've always wondered who those freaks are who don't read novels." He imagines a slip in her affections, as if she is asking herself whether she can "really love a man who doesn't see the point of made-up stories." She begins to provide him novels, stories that "will have won some award but won't be too complicated," and he reads them out of love. Us is that kind of book, a pleasurable read with short, comic chapters that also treads on satisfying emotional territory. Douglas Petersen, the biochemist, is laying out the story of his marriage and family at a crisis point. Just as his only son, Albie, is poised to leave the nest (for art school), his wife, Connie, has come to the realization that the "marriage has run its course." Douglas embarks on an exercise in reckoning, going back over the history of his life with Connie. At the same time, the family takes a literal journey, a Grand Tour of Europe (see ' Beyond the Book ') meant to be a going-away present for Albie. It's easy to imagine the story unspooling from other points of view – Albie, the young artist, grows up as he pulls away from his parents. Or Connie, the artist whose ambitions have been frustrated by conventional marriage and motherhood, sees the chance of a renaissance. But here, the focus is on Douglas, the paterfamilias, and his self-reflection is less a mid-life crisis than a mid-life coming of age. Nothing goes as Douglas has laid out in this precisely calibrated European itinerary. Even the "note to self" he makes while preparing for the Grand Tour ("3. It is not necessary to be seen to be right about everything, even when that is the case.") is quickly overridden by habitual irritations – like the fact that someone has once again failed to refill the rinse-aid in the dishwasher. As a character, Douglas is thoroughly entertaining – self-effacing and self-aware in equal measure. He claims to have been a stodgy young nerd, before Connie came around ("The only acid in this house, I was fond of saying around the lab, is deoxyribonucleic acid"), but this is a stretch, because his intelligent sense of humor carries the book. The way he tells it, Connie is the catch and he is lucky to have her. But as he comes across in Us , Douglas is the perfect romantic hero, ebullient and loving and full of wry social commentary. He fascinates. It's almost impossible to read Us without imagining the casting of the movie. Indeed, we are invited to think this way on the third page, when Douglas remembers a dinner party where everyone is guessing "who would play you in the film of your life." Nobody can think of anyone to play Douglas, but I could, and so will you. (Bill Nighy?) I like to read a novel without a lot of preconceptions, so it wasn't until later that I learned David Nicholls was an actor and screenwriter first and a novelist second. He has turned two of his previous novels, One Day and Starter for Ten , into films, and Us is soon to follow. It's possible to be cynical about reading a book that is expected to be a big commercial juggernaut, or a gateway to something bigger and more lucrative (the film) – but seeing Us through that lens would underestimate a book that is, as it should be, more than a pre-screenplay "treatment." There is emotional truth and subtlety here, in Douglas Petersen's view of the world, that will never make it to the big screen.

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David Nicholls | 3.89 | 49,072 ratings and reviews

Ranked #33 in Amsterdam , Ranked #90 in Barcelona — see more rankings .

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• #96 in Divorce

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Review: Us by David Nicholls

Today I welcome TLC Book Tours back to The Book Binder’s Daughter with a novel by David Nicholls which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.  I invite you to read my review, learn a bit about the author and visit the other stops on the book tour.

Despite their differences and some serious obstacles, Connie and Douglas manage to stay together for 25 years and raise a son named Albie.  One day, just before Albie is about to leave for college,  Connie wakes Douglas up in the middle of the night and announces that their marriage has run it’s course and she wants to leave.

About half of the book is taken up with Douglas’ musings and reminiscence about how he met Connie, their early years of marriage and their foray into parenthood.  Douglas is not sure where things went wrong in their marriage, but he truly believes that for many years they were happy.  I felt, at many times throughout his flashbacks, that he was much more devoted to Connie than she was to him.  It bothered me, for instance, that Douglas proposed to her in Venice, but it took her three months to finally say yes while he waited patiently for an answer.  He didn’t give her an ultimatum, he didn’t bring it up constantly, he simply waited.

Albie is a rather lazy, “artistic,” and brooding young man with whom I was very frustrated throughout the book.  Albie has much more in common with his mother, especially since they both have an interest in art, but I found his behavior towards his father oftentimes disrespectful and rude.  Connie’s parenting of their son is overindulgent and this does not help Douglas forge a relationship with his son.  There is a constant rift in the family with clearly delineated sides as Douglas is constantly arguing with Albie and Connie almost always takes Albie’s side.

Connie insists, despite the fact that she is walking out on Douglas, that the family take their planned tour across Europe.  The trip is painful to read about as it seems that Douglas can’t do anything right and his family is constantly laughing at his expense.  Douglas really does try to make it a successful trip, but the harder he tries the more he fails.  Will this trip finally bring them together or is it a vain attempt to mend something that is irrevocably broken?

This captivating novel is about three very different people who attempt to build a life together, but in the end they are tired of making compromises for each other at the expense of their individual happiness.   David Nicoll’s prose is beautiful and I am not surprised that US was long listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

Click on the TLC Book Tour logo below to see a full list of the stops on the tours.

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6 responses to “ Review: Us by David Nicholls ”

Great review! I loved this book and couldn’t put it down — but at the same time, I wanted to have a few words with Albie (and Connie, too.)

That’s exactly how I felt too! I read the book in a couple of days. And Albie and Connie could be very frustrating at times!

I felt like Douglas had always been more devoted to Connie than the reverse too. By the end, I was hoping they wouldn’t work things out, because I honestly think Douglas could be happier that way! I also loved the writing and found this a really enjoyable read.

Like Liked by 1 person

I also thought that they probably should not be together in the end. I was really hoping that he would drop everything and run away with the Dentist he met in Venice!

I’ve been hearing such fantastic things about this book throughout the tour – I can’t wait to read it for myself!

Thanks for being a part of the tour.

You will love it, Heather! My husband read it and loved it too!

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I enjoy books in various genres, but especially literary fiction, literature in translation, historical fiction, history, short stories and travel writing and poetry. I know Latin and Ancient Greek so classics are my specialty.

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Us: The Booker Prize-longlisted novel from the author of ONE DAY Paperback – 7 May 2015

*out now: david nicholls's new novel you are here*, the booker prize-longlisted novel by beloved bestseller david nicholls, a brilliant, bittersweet novel about love and family, husbands and wives, parents and children, one of britain's most acclaimed writers.

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Sceptre
• Publication date 7 May 2015
• Dimensions 13.1 x 2.7 x 19.7 cm
• ISBN-10 0340897015
• ISBN-13 978-0340897010
• See all details

From the Publisher

Product description

Book description.

A brilliant, bittersweet novel about love and family, husbands and wives, parents and children. From beloved bestselling author David Nicholls.

From the Back Cover

About the author.

David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten, The Understudy, One Day, Us, Sweet Sorrow and You Are Here . One Day was published in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim: translated into 40 languages, it became a global bestseller, selling millions of copies worldwide. His fourth novel, Us , was longlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. On screen, David has written adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd , When Did You Last See Your Father? and Great Expectations , as well as of his own novels, Starter for Ten, One Day and Us . His adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose , starring Benedict Cumberbatch, was nominated for an Emmy and won him a BAFTA for best writer. The Netflix adaptation of One Day was executive-produced by David.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sceptre; 1st edition (7 May 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0340897015
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0340897010
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.1 x 2.7 x 19.7 cm
• 58 in Film & Television Tie-In
• 119 in Later in Life Romance
• 152 in Love, Sex & Marriage Humour

About the author

David nicholls.

David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten, The Understudy, One Day, Us, Sweet Sorrow and now You Are Here. One Day was published in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim: translated into 40 languages, it became a global bestseller, selling millions of copies worldwide. His fourth novel, Us, was longlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

On screen, David has written adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Great Expectations, as well as of his own novels, Starter for Ten, One Day and Us. His adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, was nominated for an Emmy and won him a BAFTA for best writer.

He is also the Executive Producer and a contributing screenwriter on a new Netflix adaptation of One Day. His latest novel, You Are Here, will be published in spring 2024.

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Customers say

Customers find the book engrossing, entertaining, and well-told. They praise the writing quality as brilliant, well-done, and physical. Readers describe the humor as wry, dry, and amusing. They find the story poignant, heartwarming, and profound. They also say the characters are believable and well drawn. Reader also mention the book is insightful, perceptive, and sensitive.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book engrossing, easy to read, and page-turning. They appreciate the wry, dry humor. Readers also describe the story as believable, poignant, and pleasant.

"...I had no choice but to give five stars as its a wonderfully told story with very real and flawed characters...." Read more

"...Again, in One Day, Nicholls created some amazing set-piece scenes : cinematographically vivid, wonderfully described and with a great story: laugh-out..." Read more

"...This truly is a modern love story, in all its joyous, ecstatic , monotonous, heartbreaking, gut wrenching honesty...." Read more

"...Overall, a very good book and definitely worth your time ." Read more

Customers find the writing quality brilliant, readable, and well-done. They also appreciate the author's ability to describe classic art pieces. Readers also mention the European settings are fresh and vibrant.

"...had the great fortune of meeting him at events and he's an incredibly nice and humble man , Im delighted for his continued success with Us and..." Read more

"This is a hard book to review.It is brilliantly written : great plot, vivid characters, lovely set-piece scenes -- but I found it hard to..." Read more

"...It's an easy read (which I don't mean as a criticism) that effortlessly pulls you along as the narratives flow this way and that...." Read more

"...The European settings are fresh and vibrant and actually made me want to consider getting a passport; well, for about 10 minutes after I finished..." Read more

Customers find the book amusing, chuckling, and dry. They appreciate the wry, gentle wit throughout the book. Readers also mention the book is constantly tinged with sadness.

"...And some of the funny bits are just brilliant - actually laugh out loud.Nicholls is such a talent of British writing...." Read more

"...vivid, wonderfully described and with a great story: laugh-out-loud funny , excruciatingly embarrassing or savagely painful...." Read more

"...as deftly as David Nicholls and the opening chapters of ‘Us’ are brilliantly funny ...." Read more

"...with his son Albie, Mr. Nicholls has given us one of the most heartbreaking quotes I have ever read:..." Read more

Customers find the book poignant, heartwarming, profound, and touching. They appreciate the author's intuition, wit, and emotional intelligence. Readers also mention the book is engaging and has several home truths.

"...These are touching and insightful because they demonstrate a very one-sided viewpoint...." Read more

"...the description of the relationship between Douglas and Albie was very touching and it was in those parts of the book that I enjoyed it most...." Read more

"...There is a nice gentle , dry wit throughout the book but something intangible is missing...." Read more

"...It's very poignant and there is a section towards the end when Douglas refers to his marriage to Connie as being in parentheses which I found..." Read more

Customers find the characters believable and well-drawn. They say the book is a masterclass in characterisation, and the author's intelligence gives it a refreshingly male perspective.

"...One of the beauties of One Day is the mass appeal and how relatable the characters are to people of different ages but I felt as a younger female..." Read more

"...It is brilliantly written: great plot, vivid characters , lovely set-piece scenes -- but I found it hard to read...." Read more

"...But I found Douglas’s character gratingly annoying , and thought the book never really took off." Read more

"...Us is an outstanding character study of the middle class middle-age...." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, astute, and intriguing. They appreciate the warm and gentle humour, perceptive, and sensitive views on human nature. Readers also mention the story is interesting, educational, and at times sad and funny. They praise the author's amazing ability to take a seemingly banal and much-used topic.

"...enjoy David Nicholls' warm and gentle humour and perceptive and sensitive views on human nature and his lack of propensity for sickly-sweet endings...." Read more

"...I felt this was genuinely convincing and insightful ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the storyline. Some appreciate the realism of the ending, saying it brings many recognisable moments. However, others say the story seems dull and doesn't get them invested into the story. They also mention the chapter structure becomes irritating.

"...This truly is a modern love story , in all its joyous, ecstatic, monotonous, heartbreaking, gut wrenching honesty...." Read more

"...Us keeps it's pain to the end: indeed, a painful, nasty sucker-punch twist in the penultimate chapter. Finally, there are hints of optimism...." Read more

"...The Grand Tour was realistic and interesting , although often spoiled by Connie and Albie ganging up and leaving Douglas in the cold...." Read more

"...The chapter structure became a bit irritating - over 100 short chapters, no doubt intended to try to make it "unputdownable", an intention..." Read more

Customers find the story boring at times. They say it's not compelling, not sufficiently stimulating, and pointless. Readers also mention the book is repetitive and dull.

"...It is an easy read, although not something I found absolutely compelling ...." Read more

"...I made it through to the end but the book fails comprehensively to engage in almost every respect...." Read more

"...It's not my type of book so maybe i'm not being fair but it was sooo boring ...." Read more

"...didn't feel like there had ever been one as she was so obnoxious and unpleasant ...." Read more

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1. the burglars

Last summer, a short time before my son was due to leave home for college, my wife woke me   the middle of the night.

At first I thought she was shaking me because of burglars. Since moving to the country my wife had developed a tendency to jerk awake at every creak and groan and rustle. I’d try to reassure her. It’s the radiators, I’d say; it’s the joists contracting or expanding; it’s foxes. Yes, foxes taking the laptop, she’d say, foxes taking the keys to the car, and we’d lie and listen some more. There was always the ‘panic button’ by the side of our bed, but I could never imagine pressing it incase the alarm disturbed someone – say, a burglar for instance.

I am not a particularly courageous man, not physically imposing, but on this particular night I noted the time – a little after four – sighed, yawned and went downstairs. I stepped over our useless dog, padded from room to room, checked windows and doors then climbed the stairs once more.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Probably just air in the water pipes.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Connie, sitting up now.

‘It’s fine. No sign of burglars.’

‘I didn’t say anything about burglars. I said I think our marriage has run its course. Douglas, I think I want to leave you.’

I sat for a moment on the edge of our bed.

‘Well at least it’s not  burglars,’  I said, though neither of us smiled and we did not get back to sleep that night.  

2. douglas timothy petersen

Our son Albie would be leaving the family home in October and all too soon afterwards so would my wife. The events seemed so closely linked that I couldn’t help thinking that if Albie had flunked his exams and been obliged to retake, we might have had another good year of marriage.

But before I say any more about this and the other events that took place during that particular summer, I should tell you a little about myself and paint some sort of ‘portrait in words’. It shouldn’t take long. My name is Douglas Petersen and I am fifty-four years old. You see that intriguing final ‘e’ in the Petersen? I’m told it’s the legacy of some Scandinavian heritage, some great-grandfather, though I have never been to and have no interesting stories to tell about Scandinavia. Traditionally, Scandinavians are a fair, handsome, hearty and uninhibited people and I am none of those things. I am English. My parents, both deceased now, raised me in Ipswich; my father a doctor, my mother a teacher of biology. ‘Douglas’ came from her nostalgic affection for Douglas Fairbanks, the Hollywood idol, so there’s another red herring right there. Attempts have been made over the years to refer to me as ‘Doug’ or ‘Dougie’ or ‘Doogie’. My sister, Karen, self-proclaimed possessor of the Petersen’s sole ‘big personality’, calls me ‘D’, ‘Big D’, ‘the D-ster’ or ‘Professor D’ – which, she says, would be my name in prison – but none of these have stuck and I remain Douglas. My middle name, incidentally, is Timothy, but it’s not a name that serves anyone particularly well. Douglas Timothy Petersen. I am, by training, a biochemist.

Appearance. My wife, when we first met and felt compelled to talk constantly about each other’s faces and personalities and what we loved about each other and all of that routine, once told me that I had a ‘perfectly fine face’ and, seeing my disappointment, quickly added that I had ‘really kind eyes’, whatever that meant. And it’s true, I have a perfectly fine face, eyes that may well be ‘kind’ but are also the brownest of browns, a reasonable-sized nose and the kind of smile that causes photographs to be thrown away. What can I add? Once, at a dinner party, the conversation turned to ‘who would play you in the film of your life?’ There was a lot of fun and laughter as comparisons were made to various film stars and television personalities. Connie, my wife, was likened to an obscure  European actress, and while she protested – ‘she’s far too glamorous and beautiful’, etc. – I could tell that she was flattered. The game continued, but when it came to my turn a silence fell. Guests sipped their wine and tapped their chins. We all became aware of the background music. It seemed that I resembled no famous or distinctive person in the entire history of the world – meaning, I suppose, that I was either unique or the exact opposite. ‘Who wants cheese?’ said the host, and we moved quickly on to the relative merits of Corsica versus Sardinia, or something or other.

Anyway. I am fifty-four years old – did I say that? – and have one son, Albie, nicknamed ‘Egg’, to whom I am devoted but who sometimes regards me with a pure and concentrated disdain, filling me with so much sadness and regret that I can barely speak.

So it’s a small family, somewhat meagre, and I think we each of us feel sometimes that it is a little too small, and each wish there was someone else there to absorb some of the blows. Connie and I also had a daughter, Jane, but she died soon after she was born.

3. the parabola

There is, I believe, a received notion that, up to a certain point, men get better-looking with age. If so, then I’m beginning my descent of that particular parabola. ‘Moisturise!’ Connie used to say when we first met, but I was no more likely to do this than tattoo my neck and consequently I now have the complexion of Jabba the Hutt. I’ve looked foolish in a T-shirt for some years now but, health-wise, I try to keep in shape. I eat carefully to avoid the fate of my father, who died of a heart attack earlier than seemed right. His heart ‘basically exploded’ said the doctor – with inappropriate relish, I felt – and consequently I jog sporadically and self-consciously, unsure of what to do with my hands. Put them behind my back, perhaps. I used to enjoy playing badminton with Connie, though she had a tendency to giggle and fool about, finding the game ‘a bit silly’. It’s a common prejudice. Badminton lacks the young-executive swagger of squash or the romance of tennis, but it remains the world’s most popular racket sport and its best practitioners are world-class athletes with killer instincts. ‘A shuttlecock can travel at up to 220 miles an hour,’ I’d tell Connie, as she stood doubled over at the net. ‘Stop. Laughing!’ ‘But it’s got feathers,’ she’d say, ‘and I feel embarrassed, swatting at this thing with feathers. It’s like we’re trying to kill this finch,’ and then she’d laugh again.

What else? For my fiftieth birthday Connie bought me a beautiful racing bike that I sometimes ride along the leafy lanes, noting nature’s symphony and imagining what a collision with an HGV would do to my body. For my fifty-first, it was running gear, for  my fifty-second, an  ear- and nasal-hair  trimmer, an object that continues both to appal and fascinate me, snickering away deep in my skull like a tiny lawnmower. The subtext  of all these gifts was the same: do not stay still, try not to grow old, don’t take anything for granted.

Nevertheless, there’s no denying it; I am now middle-aged. I sit to put on socks, make a noise when I stand and have developed an unnerving awareness of my prostate gland, like a walnut clenched between my buttocks. I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the  creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.

By contrast, my wife at fifty-two years old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, ‘Douglas, that’s just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.’ To which I’d reply, ‘But none of this is a surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty- three. It’s that face.’

Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars,  it seemed that it might be too late.

‘How long have you—?’

‘A while now.’

‘So when will you—?’

‘I don’t know.  Not  any time soon, not until after Albie’s left home. After the summer. Autumn, the new year?’

Finally: ‘Can I ask why?’

4. b.c. and a.c.

For the question, and the ultimate answer, to make sense, some context might be necessary. Instinctively, I feel my life could be divided into two distinct parts – Before Connie and After Connie, and before I turn in detail to what happened that summer, it might be useful to give an account of how we met. This is a love story, after all. Certainly love comes into it.

5. the other ‘l’ word

‘Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’.  I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not ‘lonely’, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.

For most people, their twenties represent some kind of high-water mark of gregariousness, as they embark on adventures in the real world, find a career, lead active and exciting social lives, fall in love,  splash around in sex and drugs. I was aware of this going on around me. I knew about the nightclubs and the gallery openings, the gigs and the demonstrations; I noted the hangovers, the same clothes worn to work on consecutive days, the kisses on the tube and the tears in the canteen, but I observed it all as if through reinforced glass. I’m thinking specifically of the late eighties, which, for all their  hardship and turmoil, seemed like a rather exciting time. Walls were coming down, both literally and figuratively; the political faces were changing. I hesitate to call it a revolution or portray it as some new dawn  – there were wars in Europe and the Middle East, riots and economic turmoil – but there was at least a sense of unpredictability, a sense of change. I remember reading a great deal about a Second Summer of Love in the colour supplements. Too young for the First, I was completing my PhD – on Protein-RNA interactions and protein folding during translation – throughout the Second. ‘The only acid in this house,’ I was fond of saying around the lab, ‘is deoxyribonucleic acid’ – a joke that never quite got the acclaim it deserved.

Still, as the decade drew to a close things were clearly happening, albeit elsewhere and to other people, and I quietly wondered if a change was due in my life, too, and how I might bring that about.

6. drosophila  melanogaster

The Berlin Wall was still standing when I moved to Balham. Approaching thirty, I was a doctor of biochemistry living in a small, semi-furnished, heavily mortgaged flat off the High Road, consumed by work and negative equity. I spent weekdays and much of the weekends studying the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, for my first post-doc, specifically using mutagens in classical forward genetic screens. Those were exciting times in Drosophila studies, developing the tools to read and manipulate the genomes of organisms and, professionally if not personally, this was something of a golden period for me.

I rarely encounter a fruit fly now, outside of a bowl of fruit. These days I work in the private, commercial sector – ‘the evil corporation’, my son calls it – as Head of Research and Development, a rather grand title but one that means I no longer experience the freedom and excitement of fundamental science. These days my position is organisational, strategical, words like that. We fund university research in order to make the most of academic expertise, innovation and enthusiasm, but everything must be ‘translational’ now; there must be some practical application. I enjoy the work, am good at it and I still visit labs, but now I am employed to co-ordinate and manage younger people who do the work that I used to do. I am not some corporate monster; I am good at my job and it has brought success and security. But it doesn’t thrill me like it used to.

Because it was thrilling, to be working all those hours with a small group of committed, impassioned people. Science seemed exhilarating to me then, inspiring and essential. Twenty years on, those experiments on fruit flies would lead to medical innovations that we could never have imagined, but at the time we were motivated by pure curiosity, almost by a sense of play. It was just terrific fun, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that I loved my subject.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a great deal of mundane graft involved, too; computers were temperamental and rudimentary, barely more than unwieldy calculators and considerably less powerful than the phone in my pocket now, and data input was exhausting and laborious. And while the common fruit fly has a great deal in its favour as an experimental organism – fecundity, a short breeding cycle, distinctive morphology – it has little in the way of personality. We kept one as a pet in our lab’s insectory, in its own special jar with a tiny rug and doll’s house furniture, replacing it at the end of each life cycle. Though it’s tricky to sex a fruit fly, we called him/her Bruce. Allow this to stand as the archetypal example of Biochemist Humour.

Such small diversions were necessary because anaesthetising a population of Drosophila, then examining them one by one with a fine brush and a microscope, looking for tiny changes in eye pigmentation or wing shape, is frankly mind-numbing. It’s a little like embarking on an immense jigsaw. To begin with you think 'this will be fun’ and you put on the radio and make a pot of tea, before realising that there are far too many pieces, nearly all of them sky.

Consequently I was far too tired to go to my sister’s party on that Friday night. And not just tired, I was wary too, for a number of good reasons.  

7. the matchmaker

I was wary of my sister’s cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust. I was wary because parties, and dinner parties in particular, had always seemed to be a pitiless form of gladiatorial combat, with laurel garlands bestowed to the most witty, successful and attractive, and the corpses of the defeated lying bleeding on the painted floorboards. The pressure to be one’s best self in such circumstances I found paralysing, and still do, yet my sister insisted on forcing me into the arena again and again.

‘You can’t stay at home for the rest of your life, D.’

‘I don’t stay at home, I’m hardly here . . .’

‘Sat in that misery hole, all by yourself.’

‘It’s not a . . . I’m perfectly happy by myself, Karen.’

‘You’re not  happy! You’re not! How can you be happy, D? You’re not happy! You are not!’

And it was true that there was not a great deal of glee before that February night, little cause for fireworks or the punching of air. I liked my colleagues, they liked me, but for the most part, I would say goodbye to Security Steve on a Saturday afternoon then not speak until my lips parted with an audible pop on the Monday morning as I greeted him hello. ‘Good weekend, Douglas?’ he’d ask. ‘Oh, quiet, Steve, very quiet.’ Still, there was pleasure and satisfaction in my work,  a pub quiz once a month, the pint with my colleagues on a Friday night, and if I did occasionally suspect something was missing, well – didn’t everyone?

Not my sister. In her mid-twenties Karen was promiscuous in her friendships and ran with what my parents  referred to as ‘an arty crowd’: would-be actors, playwrights and poets, musicians, dancers, glamorous young people pursuing impractical careers, staying up late then meeting for long and emotional cups of tea during all hours of the working  day. For my sister, life was one long group hug and it seemed to amuse her in some obscure way to parade me in front of her younger friends. She liked to say that I had skipped youth and leapt straight into middle age, that I had been forty-three in my mother’s womb, and it was true, I suppose, that I’d never got the hang of being young. In which case why was she so desperate for me to come along?

‘Because there’ll be girls there—’

‘Girls? Girls . . . Yes, I’ve heard talk of those.’

‘One girl in particular—’

‘I do know girls, Karen. I have met and spoken to girls.’

‘Not like this one. Trust me.’

I sighed. For whatever reason, ‘fixing me up with a girlfriend’ had become something of an obsession for Karen, and she pursued it with a beguiling mixture of condescension and coercion.

‘Do you want to be alone forever? Do you? Hm? Do you?’

‘I have no intention of being alone forever.’

‘So where are you going to meet someone, D? In your wardrobe? Under the sofa? Are you going to grow them in the lab?’

‘I really don’t want to have this conversation anymore.’

‘I’m only saying it because I love you!’ Love was Karen’s alibi for all kinds of aggravating behaviour. ‘I’m laying a place for you at the table so if you don’t come, the whole evening’s ruined!’ And with that, she hung up the phone.  

8. tuna pasta bake

So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed by the shoulders into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a flimsy trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister’s notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.

‘Everyone! This is my lovely brother, Douglas. Be nice to him, he’s shy!’ My sister liked nothing more than pointing at shy people and bellowing SHY! Hello, hi, hey there Douglas, said my competitors and I contorted myself onto a tiny folding chair between a handsome, hairy man in black tights and a striped vest, and an extremely attractive woman.

‘I’m Connie,’ she said.

‘Pleased to meet you, Connie,’ I said, scalpel sharp, and that was how I met my wife.

We sat in silence for a while. I contemplated asking if she’d pass the pasta but then I’d be obliged to eat it, so instead . . .

‘What do you do, Connie?’

‘Good question,’  she said, though it was not. ‘I suppose I’m an artist. That’s what I studied, anyway, but it always sounds a bit pretentious  . . .’

‘Not at all,’ I replied, and thought, oh God, an artist. If she’d said ‘cellular biologist’ there’d have been no stopping me, but I rarely encountered such people and certainly never at my sister’s house. An artist. I didn’t hate art, not by any means, but I dislike knowing nothing about it.

‘So – watercolours or oils?’

She laughed. ‘It’s a little more complicated than that.’

‘Hey, I’m a kind of artist too!’ said the handsome man to my left, shouldering his way in. ‘A trapeze artist!’

I didn’t speak much after this. Jake, the fleecy man in vest and tights, was a circus performer who loved both his work and himself, and how could I possibly compete with a man who defied the laws of gravity for a living? Instead I sat quietly and watched her from the corner of my eye, making the following observations:

9. seven things about  her

1. She had very good hair. Well cut, clean, shiny, an almost artificial black, points brushed forward over her ears (‘Points’ – is that right?) designed to frame her wonderful face. Describing hairstyles is not my forte, I lack the vocabulary, but there was something of the fifties film star to it, what my mother would call ‘a do’, yet it was modish and contemporary too. ‘Modish’ – listen to me! Anyway, I smelt the shampoo and her scent as I sat down, not because I snuffled around in the nape of her neck like a badger, I knew better than that, but because the table was really very small.

2. Connie listened. For my sister and her friends, ‘conversation’ really meant taking it in turns to speak, but Connie listened intently to our trapeze artist, her hand on her cheek, her little finger resting in the corner of her mouth. Self-contained, calm, she had a quality of quiet intelligence. The expression she wore was intent but not entirely uncritical or unamused, so that it was impossible to discern if she found something impressive or ridiculous, an attitude that she has maintained throughout the entire course of our marriage.

3. Though I thought her lovely, she was not the most attractive woman at the table. It is traditional, I know, when describing these first encounters with loved ones to suggest that they emitted some special glow; ‘her face lit up the room’ or ‘I could not look away’. In truth, I could and did look away and would say that, in conventional terms at least, she was perhaps the third most beautiful woman in the room. My sister, with her much vaunted ‘big personality’, liked to surround herself with extremely ‘cool’ people, but coolness and kindness rarely go together and the fact that these people were often truly appalling, cruel, pretentious or idiotic was, to my sister, a small price to pay for their reflected glamour. So while there were many attractive people there that night, I was very happy to be sitting next to Connie, even if she did not at first sight effervesce, incandesce, luminesce, etc.

4. She had a very appealing voice – low, dry, a little husky, with a noticeable London accent. She has lost this over the years, but in those days there was definitely a slight swallowing  of the consonants. Usually this would be an indicator of social background, but not in my sister’s circle. One of her cock-er-ney friends spoke as if he ran a whelk stall despite his father being the Bishop of Bath and Wells. In Connie’s case, she asked sincere, intelligent questions, which nevertheless had an undertow of irony and amusement. ‘Are the clowns as funny in real life as they are on stage?’ – that kind of thing. Her voice had the instinctive cadence of a comedian and she had the gift of being funny without smiling, which I’ve always envied. On the rare occasions that I tell a joke in public, I grimace like a frightened chimpanzee, but Connie was, is, deadpan. ‘So,’ she asked, her face a mask, ‘when you’re flying through the air towards your partner, are you ever tempted, at the very, very last moment, to do this –’ and here she raised her thumb to her nose and wiggled her remaining fingers, and I thought this was just terrific.

5. She drank a great deal, refilling her glass before it was empty as if worried the wine might run out. The drink had no discernible effect except perhaps a certain intensity in conversation, as if it  required concentration. Connie’s drinking seemed quite light-hearted, with a kind of drink-you-under-the-table swagger to it. She seemed like fun.

6. She was extremely stylish. Not expensively or ostentatiously dressed but there was something right about  her. The fashion of the day placed great emphasis on ‘bagginess’, giving the impression that the guests around the table were toddlers wearing their parents’ T-shirts. Connie, in contrast, was neat and stylish in old clothes (which I have since learnt to call ‘vintage’) that were tailored and snug and emphasised her – I’m sorry, I apologise, but there really is no way around  this – her ‘curves’. She was smart, original, both ahead of the crowd and as old-fashioned as a character in a black-and-white film. In contrast, the impression I set out to create, looking back, was no impression at all. My wardrobe at that time ran the gamut from taupe to grey, all the colours of  the lichen world, and it’s a safe bet that chinos were involved. Anyway, the camouflage worked, because . . .

7. This  woman  on  my right  had  absolutely  no  interest  in me whatsoever.

10. the daring young man on the flying trapeze

And why should she? Jake the trapeze artist was a man who stared death in the face, while most nights I stared television in the face. And this wasn’t just any circus, it was punk circus, part of the new wave of circus, where chainsaws were juggled and oil drums were set on fire then beaten incessantly. Circus was now sexy; dancing elephants had been replaced by nude contortionists, ultra-violence and, explained Jake, ‘a kind of anarchic, post-apocalyptic Mad Max aesthetic’.

‘You mean the clowns don’t drive those cars where the wheels fall off?’ asked Connie, her face a stone.

‘No! Fuck that, man! These cars explode! We’re on Clapham Common next  week – I’ll get you both tickets, you can come along.’

‘Oh, we’re not together,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘We’ve just met.’

‘Ah!’ nodded Jake, as if to say ‘that makes sense’. There was a momentary pause and to fill the gap, I asked:

‘Tell me, do you find, as a trapeze artist, that it’s hard to get decent car insurance?’

The percentage varies, but some of the things I say make no sense to me at all. Perhaps I’d meant it as a joke. Perhaps I’d hoped to emulate Connie’s laconic tone through raised eyebrow and wry smile. If so, that  hadn’t come across, because Connie was not laughing but pouring more wine.

‘No, because I don’t tell ’em,’ said Jake with a rebellious swagger, which was all very anarchic but good luck with any future claims, big guy. Having steered the conversation to insurance premiums, I now dolloped out the tuna pasta bake, scalding the back of Connie’s hands with fatty strands of molten Cheddar, hot as lava, and as she peeled them off Jake returned to his monologue, stretching across me for more booze. To the extent that I’d ever thought about trapeze artists, I’d always pictured slick, broad Burt Lancaster types, smooth and brilliantined and leotarded. Jake was a wild man, covered in luxuriant body hair the colour of a basketball but still undeniably handsome, strong-featured, a Celtic tattoo encircling his bicep, a tangle of wild red hair gathered into a bun with a greasy scrunchie. When he spoke – and he spoke a great deal – his eyes blazed at Connie, passing straight through me, and I was forced to accept that I was watching a blatant seduction. At a loss, I reached for the rudimentary salad. Doused liberally with malt vinegar and cooking oil, it was my sister’s rare culinary gift to make lettuce taste like a bag of chips.

‘That moment when you’re in mid-air,’ said Jake, stretching for the ceiling, ‘when you’re falling but almost flying, there’s nothing like that. You try to hold onto it, but it’s . . . transient. It’s like trying to hold on to an orgasm. Do you know that feeling?’

‘Know it?’ deadpanned Connie. ‘I’m doing it right now.’ This made me bark with laughter, which in turn attracted a scowl from Jake, and quickly I offered the acrid salad bowl.

‘Iceberg lettuce, anyone? Iceberg lettuce?’

11. chemicals

The tuna pasta bake was forced down like so much hot clay and Jake’s monologue continue well into ‘afters’, an ironic sherry trifle topped with enough canned cream, Smarties and Jelly Tots to bring about the onset of type 2 diabetes. Connie and Jake were leaning across me now, pheromones misting the air between them, the erotic force field pushing my chair further and further away from the trestle table until I was practically in the hallway with the bicycles and the piles of Yellow Pages. At some point, Connie must  have noticed  this, because she turned to me and asked:

‘So, Daniel, what do you do?’

Daniel seemed close enough. ‘Well, I’m a scientist.’

‘Yes, your sister told me. She says you have a PhD. What field?’

‘Biochemistry, but at the moment I’m studying Drosophila, the fruit fly.’

‘Go on.’

‘Go on?’

‘Tell me more,’ she said. ‘Unless it’s top secret.’

‘No, it’s just people don’t usually ask for more. Well, how can I . . . okay,  we’re using chemical agents to induce genetic mutation  . . .’

Jake groaned audibly and I felt something brush my cheek as he reached for the wine. For some people, the word ‘scientist’ suggests either a wild-eyed lunatic or the  white-coated lackey of some fanatical organisation, an extra in a Bond film. Clearly this was the way Jake felt.

‘Mutation?’ said Jake, indignantly.  ‘Why would you mutate a fruit fly? Poor bastard, why not leave it be?’

‘Well, there’s nothing inherently unnatural about mutation. It’s just another word for evolu—’

‘I think it’s wrong to tamper with nature.’ He addressed the table now. ‘Pesticides, fungicides, I think they’re evil.’

As a hypothesis, this seemed unlikely. ‘I’m not sure a chemical compound can be evil in itself. It can be used irresponsibly or foolishly, and sadly that has sometimes been the—’

‘My mate, she’s got an allotment in Stoke Newington; it’s totally organic and her food is beautiful, absolutely beautiful . . .’

‘I’m sure. But I don’t think they have plagues of locusts in Stoke Newington, or annual drought, or a lack of soil nutrients—’

 ‘Carrots should taste of carrots,’ he shouted, a mystifying non sequitur.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite—’

‘Chemicals. It’s all these chemicals!’

Another non sequitur. ‘But . . . everything’s a chemical. The carrot itself is made of chemicals, this salad is chemical. This one in particular. You, Jake, you’re made up of chemicals.’

Jake looked affronted. ‘No I’m not!’ he said, and Connie laughed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but you are. You’re six major elements, 65 per cent oxygen, 18 per cent carbon, 10 per cent—’

‘It’s because people try to grow strawberries in the desert. If we all ate local produce, naturally grown without all these chemicals—’

‘That sounds wonderful, but if your soil lacks essential nutrients, if your family’s starving because of aphids or fungus, then you might be grateful for some of those evil chemicals.’ I’m not sure what else I said. I was passionate about my work, felt that it was beneficial and worthwhile, and as well as idealism, jealousy might also have played a part. I’d drunk a little too much and after a long evening of being alternately patronised and ignored, I had not warmed to my rival, who was of the school that thought the solution to disease and hunger lay in longer and better rock concerts.

‘There’s easily enough food to feed the world, it’s just all in the wrong hands.’

‘Yes, but that’s not the fault of science! That’s politics, economics! Science isn’t responsible for drought or famine or disease, but those things are happening and that’s where scientific research comes in. It’s our responsibility  to—’

‘To give us more DDT? More Thalidomide?’ This last blow seemed to please Jake hugely, and he broadcast a handsome grin to his audience, delighted that the misfortunes of others had provided him with a valuable debating point. Those were terrible tragedies, but I didn’t remember them being specifically my fault, or my colleagues’ – all of them responsible, humane, decent people, all ethically and socially aware. Besides, those instances were anomalies compared to all the extraordinary developments science had given us, and I had a very clear mental image of myself high, high in the shadows of the big top, sawing madly at a rope with a penknife.

‘What would happen,’ I wondered aloud, ‘if you fell from your trapeze, God forbid, and broke your legs and a massive infection set in? Because what I’d love to do, in those circumstances, Jake, what I’d love to do is stand by your bedside with the antibiotics and analgesics just out of reach and say, I know you’re in agony but I can’t give you these, I’m afraid,  because, you know, these are chemicals, created by scientists and I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to amputate both your legs. Without anaesthetic!’

12. silence

I wondered if perhaps I had overplayed my hand.  In hoping to sound impassioned I had come across as unhinged. There had been malice in what I’d said, and no one likes malice at a dinner party, not open malice, and certainly not my sister, who was glaring at me with custard dripping from her serving spoon.

‘Well, Douglas, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ she said weakly. ‘More trifle?’

More distressingly, I was not acquitting myself well in front of Connie. Even though we’d spoken only briefly, I liked this woman very much and wanted to create a good impression. With some trepidation, I glanced to my right, where she remained with her chin in the palm of her hand,  her face entirely impassive and unreadable and, to my mind, even lovelier than before as she took her hand from her face, placed it on my arm and smiled.

‘I’m so sorry, Douglas, I think I called you Daniel earlier.’ And that – well, that was like a light coming on.  

13. apocalypse

I think our marriage has run its course, she said. I think I want to leave you.

But I’m aware of having gone off on a tangent and wallowing in happier times. Perhaps I’m casting too rosy a glow. I’m aware that couples tend to embellish ‘how we met’ folklore with all kinds of detail and significance. We shape and sentimentalise these first encounters into creation myths to reassure ourselves and our offspring that it was somehow ‘meant to be’, and with that in mind perhaps it’s best to pause there for the moment, and return to where we came in – specifically the night, a quarter-century later, when the same intelligent, amusing, attractive woman woke me to say that she thought she might be happier, that her future might be fuller, richer, that all things considered she might feel more ‘alive’ if she were no longer near me.

‘I try to imagine it, us alone here every evening without Albie. Because he’s maddening, I know, but he’s the reason why we’re here, still together  . . .’

Was he the reason? The only reason?

‘. . . and I’m terrified by the idea of him leaving home, Douglas. I’m terrified by the thought  of that . . . hole.’

What was the hole? Was I the hole?

‘Why should there be a hole? There won’t be a hole.’

‘Just the two of us, rattling around in this house . . .’

‘We won’t rattle around! We’ll do things. We’ll be busy, we’ll work, we’ll do things together  – we’ll, we’ll fill the hole.’ 

‘I need a new start, some kind of change of scene.’

‘You want  to move house? We’ll move house.’

‘It’s not about  the house. It’s the idea of you and me in each other’s pockets forever more. It’s like . . . a Beckett play.’

I’d not seen a Beckett play, but presumed this was a bad thing.

‘Is it really so . . . horrific  to you, Connie,  the thought of you and I being alone together? Because I thought we had a good marriage  . . .’

‘We did, we do. I’ve been very happy with you, Douglas, very, but the future—’

‘Then why would you want to throw that away?’

‘I just feel that as a unit, as husband and wife, we did it. We did our best, we can move on, our work is done.’

‘It was never work for me.’

‘Well, sometimes it was for me. Sometimes it felt like work. Now that Albie’s leaving, I want to feel this is the beginning of something new, not the beginning of the end.’

The beginning of the end. Was she still talking about me? She made me sound like some kind of apocalypse.

The conversation went on for some time, Connie elated at all this truth-telling, me reeling from  it, incoherent, struggling to take it in. How long had she felt like this? Was she really so unhappy, so jaded? I understood her need to ‘rediscover herself’, but why couldn’t she rediscover herself with me around? Because, she said, she felt our work was done.

Our work was done. We had raised a son and he was. . . well, he was healthy. He seemed happy occasionally, when he thought no one was looking. He was popular at school and he had a certain charm, apparently. He was infuriating, of course, and always seemed to be more Connie’s son than mine; they’d always been closer, he’d always been on ‘her team’. Despite owing his existence to me, I suspected my son felt that his mother could have done better. Even so, was he really the sole purpose and product, the sole work, of twenty years of marriage?

‘I thought . . . it had never crossed my mind . . . I’d always imagined . . .’ Exhausted, I was having some trouble expressing myself. ‘I’d always bee  under the impression that we were together because we wanted to be together, and because we were happy most of the time. I’d thought that we loved each other. I’d thought . . . clearly I was mistaken, but I was looking forward to us growing old together. Me and you, growing old and dying together.’

Connie turned to me, her head on the pillow, and said,

‘Douglas, why would anyone in their right mind look forward to that?’

14. the axe

It was light outside now, a bright Tuesday in June. Soon we would rise wearily and shower and brush our teeth standing at the sink together, the cataclysm put on hold while we faced the banalities of the day. We’d eat breakfast, shout farewell to Albie, listen to the shuffle and groan that  passed for his goodbye. We would hug briefly on the gravel drive—

‘I’m not packing any suitcases yet, Douglas. We’ll talk more.’

‘Okay. We’ll talk more.’

—then I would drive off to the office and Connie would head off to the train station and the 0822 to London where she worked three days a week. I would say hello to colleagues and laugh at their jokes, respond to emails, eat a light lunch of salmon and watercress with visiting professors, listen to reports of their progress, nod and nod and all the time:

I think our marriage has run its course. I think I want to leave you.

It was like trying to go about my business with an axe embedded in my skull.  

15. holiday

I managed it, of course, because a public display of despair would have been unprofessional. It wasn’t until the final meeting of the day that my demeanour started to falter. I was fidgeting, perspiring, worrying at the keys in my pocket, and before the minutes of the meeting had even been approved I was standing and excusing myself, grabbing my phone, mumbling excuses and hurrying, stumbling towards the door, taking my chair some of the way with me.

Our offices and labs are built around a square laughably called The Piazza, ingeniously designed to receive no sunlight whatsoever. Hostile concrete benches sit on a scrappy lawn which is swampy and saturated in the winter, parched and dusty in the summer, and I paced back and forth across this desolate space in full view of my colleagues, one hand masking my mouth.

‘We’ll have to cancel the Grand Tour.’ Connie sighed. ‘Let’s see.’

‘We can’t go travelling around Europe with this hanging over us. Where’s the pleasure in that?’

‘I think we should still do it. For Albie’s sake.’

‘Well, as long as Albie’s happy!’

‘Douglas. Let’s talk about it when I get back from work. I must go now.’ Connie works in the education department of a large and famous London museum, liaising on outreach programmes to schools, collaborating with artists on devised work and other duties that I don’t quite understand, and I suddenly imagined her in hushed conversation with various colleagues, Roger or Alan or Chris, dapper little Chris with his waistcoat and his little spectacles. I finally told him, Chris. How did he take it? Not too well. Darling, you did the right thing. At last you can escape The Hole . . .

‘Connie, is there someone else?’

‘Oh, Douglas . . .’

‘Is that what this is all about? Are you leaving me for someone else?’

She sounded weary. ‘We’ll talk when we get home. Not in front of Albie, though.’

‘You have to tell me now, Connie!’

‘It’s not to do with anyone else.’

‘Is it Chris?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Little Chris, waistcoat Chris!’

She laughed, and I wondered: how is it possible for her to laugh when I have this axe protruding from my skull?

‘Douglas, you’ve met Chris. I’m not insane. There’s no one else, certainly not Chris. This is entirely about you and me.’

I wasn’t sure whether this made it better or worse.

16. pompeii

The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did. While I didn’t dwell on the notion, I had presumed that we would end our lives together. Of course, this is a largely futile desire because, disasters notwithstanding, someone has to go first. There’s a famous artefact at Pompeii – we intended to see it on the Grand Tour we had planned for the summer – of two lovers embracing, ‘spooning’ I think is the term, their bodies nested like quotation marks as the boiling, poisonous cloud rolled down the slopes of Vesuvius and smothered them in hot ash. Not mummies or fossils as some people think, but a three-dimensional mould of the void left as they decayed. Of course there’s no way of knowing that the two figures were husband and wife; they could have been brother and sister, father and daughter,  they might have been adulterers.

But to my mind the image suggests only marriage; comfort, intimacy, shelter from the sulphurous storm. Not a very cheery advertisement for married life, but not a bad symbol either. The end was gruesome but at least they were together.

But volcanoes are a rarity in our part of Berkshire. If one of us had to go first, I had hoped in all sincerity that it would be me. I’m aware that this sounds morbid, but it seemed to be the right way round, the sensible way, because, well, my wife had brought me everything I had ever wanted, everything good and worthwhile, and we had been through so much together. To contemplate a life without her; I found it inconceivable. Literally so. I was not able to conceive of it.

And so I decided that  it could not be allowed to happen.    

Us by by David Nicholls

• Genres: Fiction
• paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• ISBN-10: 0062365592
• ISBN-13: 9780062365590
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Us: How does the BBC series differ from David Nicholls’ book?

Spoiler warning: this article contains major plot details for both the series and book, article bookmarked.

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Viewers have been praising the BBC for its adaptation of David Nicholls ’ Us .

The four-part mini series, which is available to stream as a box set on BBC iPlayer, has been popular with viewers who have highlighted Tom Hollander for his performance as a man on the brink of divorce.

Based on One Day author Nicholls’ book of the same name, Us tells the story of Douglas Peterson (Hollander), who is trying to save his marriage after wife Connie (Saskia Reeves) says she wants to leave him.

Giving the relationship one last try, the pair head out on a family holiday across Europe with their teenage son Albie (Tom Taylor). However, Albie runs away, before eventually being tracked down in Barcelona with the help of musician Kat (Thaddea Graham).

Once reunited, Douglas learns that his son his gay, but soon suffers a heart attack at the hotel. Connie visits him in hospital, leaving Douglas hopeful that his wife will stay with him.

However, the pair still end up going their separate ways after dropping Albie off at university. In the future, Connie and Douglas are seen having a good relationship as friends, with Douglas seemingtly moving on with Freja (Sofie Gråbøl), who he met in Venice.

Despite Nicholls adapting Us for TV himself, there are some key differences between the adaptation and the original.

Because Us is written as a monologue, certain references are left out of the TV show. One key omission is that Douglas’s own father had died of a heart attack, a clue which may have foreshadowed his own health problems in the final episode.

In the book, it is also revealed that Connie had a short affair early on in her marriage to Douglas. In general, the TV show gives the two leads more clearly defined happy endings than those they have in the book.

In Nicholls’s text, Connie starts dating a former partner after her split from Douglas, which causes a lot of tension for the family.

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Additionally, the book ends with Douglas researching Freja’s contact details online, leaving their chance of reunion open to interpretation as opposed to the more concrete ending of the show.

You can read The Independent’ s four-star review of Us here

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Us: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, October 28, 2014

Now a PBS Masterpiece television miniseries starring Tom Hollander and Saskia Reeves

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize

David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his enormously popular New York Times bestseller, One Day , to a compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart.

Douglas Petersen may be mild-mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells him she thinks she wants a divorce.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Hoping to encourage her son’s artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and might even help him to bond with Albie.

Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of marriage and parenthood, the regrets of abandoning youth for middle age, and the intricate relationship between the heart and the head. And in David Nicholls’s gifted hands, Douglas’s odyssey brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafés of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date October 28, 2014
• Dimensions 6 x 1.29 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062365584
• ISBN-13 978-0062365583
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2014: At an ungodly hour one summer morning, a time when most of us cannot digest a simple greeting let alone any grand revelation, Douglas Petersen’s wife, Connie, informs him that she doesn’t want to be married anymore. Or rather, she’s not sure. Mind you, this is no fickle woman and this is not an admission she makes lightly. Connie and Douglas have been together, and happily so, for almost two decades. They have a son, Albie, more a chip off his artistic mum than biochemist dad, and that has strained the father-son dynamic. Will an ill-timed family vacation provide the opportunity Douglas needs to repair both relationships? With humor and with heart, David Nicholls of One Day fame takes us through every bumbling but well-meaning attempt in service to this goal. Lest you think the premise wreaks of a rom-com starring Hugh Grant, it is not a story tied up with a neat little bow. Nor is the precarious marriage portrayed as a consequence of cinematically-friendly scenes like slamming doors, flying frying pans, or people leaving the toilet seat up on purpose. Instead, Us delicately and intelligently untangles one of the more complex, heart-wrenching and relatable of relationship struggles—one in which there isn’t a villain to blame. You’ll be rooting for this family, and for another fine achievement from David Nicholls. –Erin Kodicek

“The Petersen family travels through Europe with more emotional baggage than luggage in Nicholls’s winning follow-up to his 2009 bestseller One Day ….Few authors do messed-up relationships better than Nicholls.” — People , Book of the Week

“Nicholls is a deft craftsman, a skilled storyteller and a keen observer of contemporary mores.” — Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review

“In his latest…Mr. Nicholls again deals with love lost and possibly found, offering an unpredictable (and less grim) ending…. Mr. Nicholls mines the setup for laughs, as he should, but he also provides a poignant story of regret in middle age.” — New York Times

“A great novel...Nicholls is a master of nuanced relationships. He’s also a pro at delivering a tight, clever structural narrative, as he proved in his terrific previous novel One Day .” — Entertainment Weekly

“I loved this book. Funny, sad, tender: for anyone who wants to know what happens after the Happy Ever After.” — Jojo Moyes, author of Me Before You and One Plus One

“Wonderful. A novel that manages to be both truly hilarious and deeply affecting. I loved it.” — S.J. Watson, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Go to Sleep

“Nicholls is a delightfully funny writer…and this over-planned vacation makes ripe material for comedy… Us evolves into a poignant consideration of how a marriage ages, how parents mess up and what survives despite all those challenges.” — Washington Post

“A smartly optimistic romantic comedy that uses angst and humor to illuminate the resilience of the human heart… Part requiem, part reboot, Douglas’s...efforts to preserve his disintegrating family take him on another kind of journey, too, from despair to unexpected joy.” — O Magazine, November 2014

“A thoughtful, funny, authentic story…Pitch-perfect dialogue and seamless action propel the story forward in a way that feels cinematic.…This is the kind of book that reminds us what it means to be alive. How often does a reader get to feel that?” — Good Housekeeping

“But for all of their burdens and battles, Douglas and Connie have moments of real joy in their marriage and while it doesn’t always seem like a pleasure, reading about it sure is.” — Time magazine

“ Us is a quick read but a charming one; a portrait of two journeys―one measured in kilometers, the other in the heart.” — Seattle Times

“What happens when domestic bliss becomes rote? Is the past strong enough to bind us together when it happens? Nicholls’ answer is complicated, poignant, wise―and disarmingly human.” — Miami Herald

“It’s a great combination of laughs and heart…Just what you need on these too-short days, no?” — Sophie Kinsella, Redbook

“David Nicholls’s latest… is a smartly optimistic romantic comedy that uses angst and humor to illuminate the resilience of the human heart…. Part requiem, part reboot, Douglas’s endearingly inept efforts to preserve his disintegrating family take him on another kind of journey, too, from despair to unexpected joy.” — Oprah.com

“From the author of One Day ―which was infinitely better than the movie―comes a pathos-laden love story about marriage on the brink of collapse.” — Entertainment Weekly , “A Dozen Books We're Dying to Read This Fall.”

“The bestselling author of One Day …is back with another crowd-pleaser, this time about a man trying to save his collapsing marriage and connect with his teenage son during a family tour of Europe.” — People , Best Books of the Fall (2014)

“Complex family drama...perfect read for the holidays!” — Huffington Post , Top 10 Books to Read This Winter

“A smartly optimistic romantic comedy that uses angst and humor to illuminate the resilience of the human heart.” — Oprah.com, “Paperbacks that Dazzle”

“Nicholls is a master of the braided narrative, weaving the past and present to create an intricate whole…. A funny and moving novel.” — Kirkus Reviews   (starred review)

“Nicholls brings his trademark wit and wisdom to this by turns hilarious and heartbreaking examination of a long-term marriage…. This tender novel will further cement Nicholls’ reputation as a master of romantic comedy.” — Booklist (starred review)

“For those who loved One Day , the author’s latest is another heart-grabber about discovering what makes us happy and learning to let go.” — Library Journal  (starred review)

“Liked One Day ? Then you’ll find this absolutely fabulous.… Very funny and very moving, often at the same time.” — Daily Mail (London)

From the Back Cover

David Nicholls brings the wit and intelligence that graced his New York Times bestseller one day to a compellingly human, deftly humorous new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and what happens when everything threatens to fall apart.

Douglas Petersen may be mild mannered, but behind his reserve lies a sense of humor that, against all odds, seduces beautiful Connie into a second date . . . and eventually into marriage. Now, almost three decades after their relationship first blossomed in London, they live more or less happily in the suburbs with their moody seventeen-year-old son, Albie. Then Connie tells Douglas that she thinks she wants a divorce.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Hoping to encourage her son’s artistic interests, Connie has planned a month-long tour of European capitals, a chance to experience the world’s greatest works of art as a family, and she can’t bring herself to cancel. And maybe going ahead with the original plan is for the best, anyway? Douglas is privately convinced that this landmark trip will rekindle the romance in the marriage, and may even help him to bond with Albie.

Narrated from Douglas’s endearingly honest, slyly witty, and at times achingly optimistic point of view, Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves and learning how to get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of marriage and parenthood and the intricate relationship between the heart and the head. And in David Nicholls’s gifted hands, Douglas’s odyssey brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafés of Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and maybe even his whole life, around?

About the Author

David Nicholls's most recent novel, the New York Times bestseller One Day , has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into thirty-seven languages; the film adaptation starred Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway. Nicholls's previous novels include Starter for Ten and The Understudy . He trained as an actor before making the switch to writing and has twice been nominated for BAFTA awards.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First American Edition (October 28, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062365584
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062365583
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.29 x 9 inches
• #6,463 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #20,775 in Literary Fiction (Books)
• #50,257 in Contemporary Romance (Books)

About the author

David nicholls.

David Nicholls is the bestselling author of Starter for Ten, The Understudy, One Day, Us, Sweet Sorrow and now You Are Here. One Day was published in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim: translated into 40 languages, it became a global bestseller, selling millions of copies worldwide. His fourth novel, Us, was longlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

On screen, David has written adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Great Expectations, as well as of his own novels, Starter for Ten, One Day and Us. His adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, was nominated for an Emmy and won him a BAFTA for best writer.

He is also the Executive Producer and a contributing screenwriter on a new Netflix adaptation of One Day. His latest novel, You Are Here, will be published in spring 2024.

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Customers say

Customers find the book pleasing, refreshing, and accurate. They also describe the humor as funny, witty, and quirky. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, effortless, and concise. They find the characters believable and sympathetic. They appreciate the meaningful insights into life and the intricate relationship between spouses. Additionally, they mention the ending is bittersweet.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book pleasing, brilliant, and refreshing. They also say it's a good book club book and relatable. Readers appreciate the memorable quotes between chapters.

"...The author expertly brought the story to life ; the characters were so complex and fascinating, oscillating between being flawed, lovable, irritating..." Read more

"...It sounded like a soap opera.I was totally wrong. This book is very fun ...." Read more

"Oh joy of joys. Us was a wonderful read . This writer manages to be funny, witty and very serious all at once...." Read more

"...The writing style is clear, concise, and amusing ...." Read more

Customers find the humor in the book very funny, witty, and poignant. They describe the story as quirky, charming, and clever. Readers appreciate the great quotes at the start of chapters. They say the book is emotional, unexpected, and touching.

"...A very clever , engrossing read, I really cared about.and identified with the characters.'..." Read more

"...This book is very fun. It is well written and the humor is delightfully ..." Read more

"...Us was a wonderful read. This writer manages to be funny, witty and very serious all at once. His characters are fabulously well-drawn...." Read more

"...features all those characteristics, but with a quirky, upbeat, witty emphasis . The writing style is clear, concise, and amusing...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book well-written, easy, and humorous. They appreciate the effortless narration and clear, concise writing style that is easy for readers to relate to. Readers also describe the book as quirky, charming, and quick.

"...It was beyond glorious!It was so magnificently written that it felt like a movie playing in my head as I read it, it was so vivid...." Read more

"...I was totally wrong. This book is very fun. It is well written and the humor is delightfully..." Read more

"...The writing style is clear, concise , and amusing...." Read more

"The writing in this book is really wonderful , and on that basis alone, I recommend it...." Read more

Customers find the characters believable and relatable. They also appreciate the narrator's voice ringing true.

"...The author expertly brought the story to life; the characters were so complex and fascinating, oscillating between being flawed, lovable, irritating..." Read more

"...His characters are fabulously well-drawn . I really believe all of those characters are real people because they are so rounded...." Read more

"...Douglas is such an interesting character , so perfectly flawed. He means well, but at the same time he so annoying, so self absorbed. So, human...." Read more

"...and the redemption you've waited for in these shallow, pointless characters never arrives !..." Read more

Customers find the book has meaningful insights into life. They say it's poignant, real, and excellent at examining the intricate relationship between spouses. Readers also mention the book is thought-provoking and incisive.

"...brought the story to life; the characters were so complex and fascinating , oscillating between being flawed, lovable, irritating, boring, interesting..." Read more

"...The dialogue is perfectly written, and the descriptions of married life are spot-on ...." Read more

"...This writer manages to be funny, witty and very serious all at once. His characters are fabulously well-drawn...." Read more

"David Nicholls, in his penetrating and incisive portrait of a marriage , forces all of us to examine our intimate relationships and in doing so..." Read more

Customers find the book heartbreaking, bittersweet, and believable. They describe it as an optimistic tale. Readers also mention the book is touching and has one of the best descriptions of parental grief.

"...were so complex and fascinating, oscillating between being flawed, lovable , irritating, boring, interesting, kind, mean, funny, intense - and so on...." Read more

"...And the last chapter was a wonderful way to end . (No spoiler here. You'll have to read it.)..." Read more

"...This novel features all those characteristics, but with a quirky, upbeat , witty emphasis...." Read more

"...witty sharp prose interspersed with some poignant and heartbreakingly brutal observations which keeps the story flowing at a good pace...." Read more

Customers find the characters very real, true to life, and believable. They appreciate the details and the author's talent for creating realistic yet likable characters. Readers also mention the narration is effortless and honest in depicting a couple's life.

"...The Grand Tour' was such a descriptive , evocative gem - I could picture the places the family visited...." Read more

"...Loved this. Loved the characters, loved the story, loved the details ." Read more

"...The book was refreshing, honest , fun, sad, accurate and right on the money. I must say and at times too close to the bone!..." Read more

"...pleasing read, well written with characters sympathetically and accurately drawn ...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the storyline. Some mention it's a great story of a marriage, while others say it seems predictable and unrealistic.

"...to life; the characters were so complex and fascinating, oscillating between being flawed , lovable, irritating, boring, interesting, kind, mean,..." Read more

"A very bleak story of family breakdown ...." Read more

"...Douglas is such an interesting character, so perfectly flawed . He means well, but at the same time he so annoying, so self absorbed. So, human...." Read more

"...But this book never got going for me . The characters were mainly unlikeable and the story never really happened...." Read more

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The book is great--just missing pages

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The Us Book Ending Is Pretty Divisive

David Nicholls' 2014 novel has been adapted into a brand new BBC comedy-drama.

The BBC's newest comedy-drama Us centres around the seemingly happy, but dysfunctional Petersen clan, who set out on a grand tour of Europe despite strained relationships in the family trio. The series is adapted from David Nicholls' best-selling novel of the same name, and if the on-screen reimagining stays close to the pages of the original story, the Us book ending is sure to leave fans divided .

As the Independent reports, Nicholls' 2014 novel follows the story of married couple Douglas and Connie Petersen, who, along with their teenage son Albie, reluctantly embark on a family adventure across Europe, stopping by in the likes of Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, and Venice along the way. Not everything is quite so rosy, however, as right before the family vacation, frustrated artist Connie expresses her desire to end their 25 year-long marriage — a bombshell which inspires Douglas to use the trip as an opportunity to win back his wife's love. In a review for the Guardian , the story is described as a "funny but curiously buttoned-up" follow up to the author's hit 2009 release One Da y . But how does Us end?

Potential spoilers lie ahead. If you'd prefer to witness the drama unfold on-screen, look away now.

Well, as noted in the Tea in the Treetops book review blog , those hoping for a happy ending might be in for a major disappointment, because upon the novel's conclusion, it is revealed that Douglas' attempts at saving his marriage have failed, leaving him single and alone.

As previously mentioned, the story has recently been adapted for the small-screen by the BBC in which The Night Manager's Tom Hollander takes on the leading role of Douglas. As the Radio Times reports, Luther star Saskia Reeves appears in the comedy-drama as wife Connie, whilst Doctor Foster’s Tom Taylor stars as the pair's teenage son Albie. Other members of the show's cast include Curfew’s Thaddea Graham as Kat, Father Brown's Gina Bramhill, Agents of SHIELD star Iain DeCaestecker, and The Killing’s Sofie Gråbøl.

Commenting on the new series, which is described by the BBC as a "poignant and often hilarious story," executive producers Greg Brenman and Roanna Benn credited the show's "exceptional cast" and Nicholls' "glorious" adaptation.

“David Nicholls is a unique and rare talent who miraculously manages to intertwine profound emotion with full-on humour. This glorious adaptation has attracted an exceptional cast in Tom Hollander, Saskia Reeves and Sofie Gråbøl," the pair said in a statement.

Us begins on Sunday, September 20 at 9 p.m. on BBC One.

This article was originally published on Sep. 16, 2020