26 April 2024

You Are Here by David Nicholls

David Nicholls’s new novel, You Are Here, is “auspiciously timed to follow the TV adaptation of his mammoth-selling One Day”, says Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. It’s full of the “winning ingredients” common to many of his books: turbulent holidays, marital troubles, witty conversation and “a friendship that might become love”. Here, the friendship in question is between Michael, a 42-year-old geography teacher, and Marnie, 38, a lonely copy editor. A mutual friend organises a coast-to-coast group walking trip in northern England, but a series of “cancellations, drop-outs and hissy fits about the low-grade towels in provincial hotels” leaves Michael and Marnie as the only participants left. Gradually, a “buttoned-up, weather-beaten and wistful” romance blooms.

Nicholls is known for being a dab hand at the “Ordinary English Love Story”, says Erica Wagner in the FT, so some readers may wonder if You Are Here stays “just a little too much” in his safe zone. But it’s unarguable that he’s “a master of his particular craft”: his skills, like those of certain other novelists, call to mind the wonders of engineering. “You don’t have to notice how a bridge holds you up in order for its span to support you, but there’s pleasure to be had in noting the tension and compression in the cables and towers.” Ultimately, this is a novel “that will make you feel terrific. Just now, don’t we all need that more than ever?”

You Are Here is available to buy here.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Feud: Truman Capote vs the Swans is a new TV series exploring how the famed writer fell out with his coterie of high-society female friends. But Capote made his literary name with a far grittier subject: the 1959 killing of four members of a family in Holcomb, a small town in Kansas. In Cold Blood, Capote’s account of the massacre, is “one of the great books of American 20th-century literature”, says Ed Pilkington in The Guardian. The chilly precision of his writing “resonates from the first sentence”, and is backed up by exhaustive research: Capote travelled 1,700km from New York to Holcomb when he read about the killing in a newspaper, and stayed there, on and off, until the murderers were hanged in 1965.

In Cold Blood is available to buy here.

Elsewhere in The Knowledge Premium:

🇮🇳 The book that made Salman Rushdie’s name
🎙️ War correspondent Christina Lamb on her favourite books
🏝️ The ex-Playboy Bunny who moved to a desert island