One Day author David Nicholls on writing the British love story that's left the world heartbroken

In the first in our new Culture Shifters series looking back at artworks that have had a major impact, the novelist reflects on his 2009 romance turned Netflix phenomenon.

Bestselling author David Nicholls is thought of by his fans as a master of the romantic comedy. His new novel You Are Here is already receiving rave reviews and will fly off the shelves. However, it’s a much older work that readers typically want to talk to him about. One Day, his 2009 book, has been nudged back into the public conversation by the huge success of the 14-part Netflix adaptation starring Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall, which premiered in February. 

"People have sent me really lovely messages about watching it to the end and then going back and watching it from the beginning again and treating it almost like a record that they love," Nicholls tells the BBC. "That's brilliant because it's very hard to put narrative pull into a love story. It's very hard to find a way to keep people coming back because often the incidents are so small – just looks or smiles or arguments. They're not big events. They're not murders or explosions. They are tiny and those actors managed to make the smallest things feel important and emotional."

The year 2009 was a good one for novels by British writers. Among the titles published were Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger and AS Byatt's The Children's Book. All three made the Booker Prize shortlist and Wolf Hall won it. But despite not making even the Booker longlist, One Day has had a greater cultural impact than any of them.

A screenwriter and former actor, Nicholls was writing a BBC television adaptation of Tess of the d'Urbervilles when he was reminded of a passage in Thomas Hardy's novel that had impressed him when he first read it as a teenager. The passage, in which Tess realises that one date in the year has a particular significance, gave Nicholls the germ of an idea for his third novel.

In One Day a couple meet and spend the night together on 15 July, 1988, the day of their graduation from the University of Edinburgh, and then we check in with Emma and Dexter on the same day every year for the next 20 years to see how – or if – their relationship is progressing. It is a love story, and Nicholls planned it meticulously. He worked out detailed biographies for Emma and Dexter so that he knew what they would be doing all year round, not just on the day we visit them. He printed out a draft of the novel and then typed up the entire manuscript again, editing as he went along. His hard work paid off.

The Guardian reviewer thought it "a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound". The critic in The Times described it as "a wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad". The novelist Jonathan Coe declared it the best novel he had read in 2009, writing: "It's rare to find a novel which ranges over the recent past with such authority, and even rarer to find one in which the two leading characters are drawn with such solidity, such painful fidelity, to real life that you really do put the book down with the hallucinatory feeling that they've become as well known to you as your closest friends."

Readers agreed. One Day has sold more than six million copies worldwide, and has been translated into 40 different languages. There was a period in Britain when everyone on public transport seemed to be reading it. A headline in The Observer referred to Nicholls as "the man who made a nation cry", a reference to the book's now famous – infamous even, given the shock it causes readers – twist.

A film version released in 2011 and starring Anne Hathaway as Emma has some devotees but received some pretty vicious reviews. Many felt Hathaway was miscast. However, the series, with Mod and Woodall as Emma and Dexter, has been a smash hit. It reached the Netflix top 10 in 89 countries, was number one in numerous territories, and remained in the global top 10 list for seven weeks. There was a social media craze for fans posting videos of themselves crying after watching the final scene. On X, viewers jokingly declared that they were going to send Netflix the bill for the therapy required to help them recover from the emotional devastation wrought by the series. Kim Kardashian recommended it to her 364 million Instagram followers.

How to account for its mega-hit status? "Romance is a popular genre on Netflix. Bridgerton, Heartstopper, and other series have been hits for the platform," says Richard Lawson, the chief critic at Vanity Fair magazine. "The book's popularity and the easily marketed hook of the premise are certainly factors.

"One Day also really lends itself to the bingeing format – it's built in such a way, one vignette tumbling into the next, that proves highly addictive. Plus, it's genuinely good, and that cannot be said about a lot of Netflix originals these days. There's thought and artistry behind it."

Jonny Weldon is the actor who plays Emma's irritating sometime partner Ian in the Netflix adaptation, a role that has given him real a career boost. He tells the BBC that he feels One Day strikes a chord with viewers because it's about "fundamental stages of human life, and in particular it dives into those years when you leave university, released from a safe bubble into the big wide world where you have to work out how you identify with yourself, others and the world around you".

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Both the show and the novel open and end in Edinburgh, a city Nicholls has loved since staying there when appearing in a student play at the celebrated Fringe festival. Jenni Steele, film and creative industries manager at VisitScotland, the national tourism organisation, says: "The Netflix adaptation of One Day has certainly created a buzz in the city. It's too early to say how much of an impact the series has had – however we know screen tourism is a long-term trend and the effects will last long after the initial broadcast. Our own research shows that the original film adaptation of One Day, back in 2011, is still mentioned by visitors, years after its release."

The VisitScotland SEO and analytics team also noted that there was a boost to the search terms "Edinburgh One Day" and "Edinburgh Scotland" following the release of the series.

Hence, as You Are Here is published, Nicholls is still being asked about a novel he began writing more than a decade and a half ago. He was involved in the show as an executive producer and he also wrote episode 13, the penultimate in the series. The reason he didn't write the whole thing – despite winning a Bafta for his TV adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels – "is because it was so familiar to me. I've been thinking about One Day for 17 years, and I just felt like it needed someone to take it to pieces in a more radical way than I'd have been capable of."

Of working on the show, he says, "It was a very, very happy experience. I love what Nicole Taylor [the lead writer] and her team have done. They made really smart decisions and they improved on the novel. I completely adore Ambika and Leo and their performances. It's been a model of an experience. So much so that I kind of worry about doing it again with someone else."

And yet he insists that when he first watched it, he had no idea it would become the monster hit that it has. "Absolutely not. I've never watched anything and known what its fate is going to be but I did think that everyone had done their best possible work. After that, you can't predict anything at all."

The new novel You are Here, Nicholls's sixth and, he believes, "the best thing I've written", contains all the elements that have become his trademark: comedy, piercing social observation, more cultural references than Taylor Swift and, of course, romance. It revolves around two lonely, disappointed people, bruised by break-ups, who meet on a coast-to-coast walk across the north of England. Marnie and Michael are 38 and 42 respectively.

"Looking across the six novels, they are all about love and the experience of love, and what it's to like fall in and out of love between the ages of 16 and 58 – Douglas is 58 at the end of Us [Nicholls's fourth novel] and Charlie is 16 at the beginning of Sweet Sorrow [the fifth novel]. [With You are Here] I wanted to write about the bit in the middle," Nicholls says.

"I also wanted to write a love story about loneliness. I think it came indirectly out of lockdown and out of feeling unusually self-conscious and self-aware when I started to see friends again. A little bit wary and nervous about the whole business of human interaction, as if it was a skill that I'd forgotten."

The Observer says of You Are Here: "The reader becomes so invested in the outcome of this unspectacular, everyday, cagoul-clad romance that it makes the whole world shimmer with a kind of secret possibility". The Sunday Times says it is "a triumph, a real gift of a novel". A screen version would seem a certainty.

"There's been some discussion about it," says Nicholls. "I can't say more than that. It's a hard one because it's outside in the English weather, and a lot of it is very internal and unspoken and you have to find a way to put that onscreen but the cast of One Day did it amazingly well. It's absolutely possible with great actors so, we'll see."

You Are Here is out now in the UK and published on May 28 in the US

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