A Long, Long Walk: A Guest Post by David Nicholls

By David Nicholls / May 29, 2024 at 9:59 am

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You Are Here (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

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While an unexpected ten-day hike might not sound like the start of a life-changing romance, you’ll be packing your bags as soon as you start reading You Are Here. P.S. Like all of you, we’re hooked on the Netflix series One Day, and we know what you’re thinking: keep the tissues close. But this is a laugh-out-loud charmer.

The walks began eleven years ago. Stuck with my writing, restless, I’d decided to get out of London and walk some of the Northumbrian Coastal Path, four days of hiking, clifftops, castles, vast empty beaches. I loved that first walk, rain and all, and decided to make it an annual tradition; a long, solitary walk through northern England, listening to music, thinking things over.

‘Perhaps there’s a book in that,’ a friend suggested. I’m wary of memoir but I loved the idea of writing onto a landscape, imagining characters reacting to real life obstacles, through the wind and rain that accompanies nearly every British walk, imagining their reactions to both the majestic and the melancholy of small towns on a grey day. My first instinct was to write a family drama – I’d been on enough long hikes with my kids to know the tensions that can arise – but why not a love story? We usually associate romantic-comedy with city life, cocktails and dinner parties and London landmarks, but perhaps there was something in setting two characters on a long walk, seeing them notice each other, start to talk and make each other laugh, but in fields and forests, moors and mountaintops.

And so here are Michael and Marnie, both disappointed in love and wary of company. Michael, a northern Geography teacher, reserved and down-to-earth, is reeling from a recent separation. Marnie, a Londoner, wry and cynical and wary of the great outdoors, has abandoned relationships altogether, committing instead to the world of books and a life indoors. Bought together by a mutual friend, they set out on a journey, an odd-couple road-trip, except that at no point are they allowed to drive.

But where are they going? It would take time and distance for these two to drop their defences, and so for research I set out myself, walking the famous Coast to Coast path, a 200-mile journey through the Cumbrian Lakes, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, a high belt across the UK from the Irish to the North Sea. It really was the most extraordinary, inspiring research trip and I hope my love for that part of the country has found its way onto the pages of You Are Here. It’s a novel with maps, and I could happily give you the co-ordinates for every joke, every argument, every tentative moment of contact along the way.

And I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the writing process more. In part, the book is a response to the confines of the pandemic, that sense of confinement and anxiety, and certainly it’s the funniest and most hopeful story I’ve told. While writing You Are Here, I also had the privilege of collaborating on the Netflix adaptation of my previous novel, One Day, and that process fed into the new book too, so that You Are Here is a kind of emotional sequel, a further examination of the grey area between love and friendship, an exploration of the next stage of life, early middle-age. Neither Michael nor Marnie are where they thought they’d be, but both sense the possibility of change, of a second chance.

And now, eleven years after that first journey, the novel is out. The intention was to write a novel about connection and conversation, and I hope you’ll laugh along with Marnie and Michael and perhaps even take the book with you on a long, long walk.