David Nicholls

Which is something a lot of modern media forgets.

And speaking of adult themes and the brutal reality of time, we have to look at One Day by David Nicholls.

This is basically the long game thesis of When Harry Met Sally taken to its absolute agonizing limits.

It takes the concept of two people who keep intersecting across the years and stretches the elastic until it snaps.

And now, obviously, we can't talk about book festivals and you can't write about book festivals without talking about authors.

George Saunders, David Nicholls, Ann Patchett and more all make appearances in this book.

And I gather you wrote to them asking for permission to include them?

I did.

Each week we're joined by amazing comedian guests and writers to discuss some wonderful and crucially weird books.

Previous guests include Naomi Klein, Graham Norton, Maggie O'Farrell, Sophie Ellis-Bexter, David Nicholls, Nish Kumar, Ian Ranking, Harriet Water, Marianne Keyes, Yomi Adekoke, Aisling B, Kate Moss, Roisin Conaty, Eliza Clark, Andy Osho, and so many more who've joined us to talk about reading and being a weirdo.

And this series will be no different.

We have some incredible guests coming up, like Jenny Eclair, Ardlo Hamnan, Rebecca F. Kwong, Andre Asselman, Josie Long, and so many more.

Um, it was, it, it was a combination of things.

I left to do a show with the producer and one of the writers, who was David Nicholls, famously of-

Oh, wow, One Day.

I-

How do you follow that? Well, this October, we have our best line-up so far.

We have characters including Jay McInerney, and Michael Connolly, and Patrick Radden Keefe, and David Nicholls, and Julian Barnes, Candice Bushnell, Katie Kitamara, Michelle Hussain, Emily Maitlis, Yale Vanderwooden, Deborah Lipstadt, and Kemi Badenoch.

Do come and join us on October the 10th and 11th.

All history books should have soundtracks.

But more importantly, it is highly strategic.

The press release details that this is an eight-part adaptation written by David Nicholls, and it's based on his own bestselling novel.

And the source explicitly points out his track record, right? He previously wrote One Day, which became that massive hit adaptation for Netflix back in 2024.

Yeah.

Yeah, but that executive praise, it masks a very real creative risk, I think.

Oh, I totally agree.

Because honestly, on paper, combining David Nicholls and Lenny Abrahamson is like...

It's like pairing a Michelin star chef with a champion street food vendor to make the ultimate comfort food.

Yes, and you've read-

... which is David Nicholls, Caroline, don't you?

Yeah, yeah.

So I've read Not The Adults, which I do have and I'm gonna read-

So there is this kind of weight of expectation on them as a couple.

We also have passages from Robin in this.

We talked about in, in our David Nicholls summer special about how he effortlessly writes men and women.

Mm.

No, not at all.

One Day on Netflix, which is based on David Nicholls' book- Uses time on a really deeply personal scale.

Mm-hmm.

It traces the unexpected friendship of Dexter and Emma over 14 years, but it checks in on them on the exact same date every single year.

The tension of the oral history format is totally erased by the objective lens of the camera

David Nicholls' One Day does something very similar with the rhythm of time

Oh yeah, that's a great example

The Netflix series is wonderfully done, but the book's entire emotional heartbeat relies on its structural gimmick, which is checking in on Emma and Dexter on the exact same date, July 15th, for 20 years