One of the last books we read in book club was Pride and Prejudice, although I misremembered and read Sense and Sensibility instead, and I wasn’t a massive fan. I don’t know if you are allowed to say that of these classics, but it’s true. I am also not a fan of romance novels and so my second reading of You are Here was one that I thought I was going to have to plough through at speed and just get it done!

How wrong was I!

I enjoyed this book so much more second time around, possibly because I knew what was going to happen and so could focus more on how it was happening both in terms of content and writing.

Nicholls is the mastermind – author and scriptwriter – behind the book/Netflix drama of One Day. A time when we see a young couple get together, break up but stay as friends, and then visit them on the same day each year until the dramatic ending.

You are Here also sees a couple get together but then for reasons of awkwardness, lost love and generally being out of practise, separate, only this time a coast to coast walk structures the story.

The role of walking and nature

As part of a group brought together by the happily married Cleo, Marnie and Michael are co-opted to join although both reluctant. The walk planned by Michael, a geography teacher, is the Wainwright coast to coast walk across Cumbria and Yorkshire with a fair but of up and downing along the way both in landscape and emotions. Both Marnie and Michael are struggling to overcome breakdowns in relationships, becoming isolated, lonely and stuck. The effervescent Cleo is determined to jolt them out of their solitary comfort zones.

Claire Balding, presenter of the radio programme Ramblings, exemplifies on Saturday mornings how walking can allow people to talk. Many of the groups she walks with have come together through a shared loss, grief or illness and have found walking with others to be theraputic and so it is for Marnie and Michael. The book is structured around the walk, broken down into sections walked each day and as the walk continues, Michael and Marnie start to talk and discover that they enjoy each other’s company and can almost tell each other about their past relationships. But not quite and this then becomes their downfall.

Part of walking is to be in nature and to notice what is around you, and the book does that very well. We really do feel like we are walking with them.

It’s not always easier to walk downhill, and as they descended, he smiled at the yelps and groans behind him as the hand that held them back on the ascent now shoved them forward. Finally the ground levelled, and they crossed a beck swollen with the recent rains and followed its bank into a valley, sickle-shaped, steep-sided, exquisite in its pale greens and russet browns, like a perfect apple. The path was well-worn but it felt as if they had stumbled on some hidden kingdom, reed buntings flitting alongside them, like perfectly skimmed stones.

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MIchael uses walking to exhaust himself into numbness to cope with his separation and another traumatic incident in his life.

The humour

This is a very funny book, possibly because I also used to be a teacher, but for a whole variety of reasons. The dialogue is what Nicholls excels at.

We have snippets of Michael talking to teenage boys about geographical phenomena on field trips. Shades of Joyce Grenfell’s George – Don’t Do That with only the teacher’s side of the conversation

“Anyone? That’s right, glacial erosion, consisting of . . .? Wake up, you lot, you know this. Yes, abrasion and plucking!

Why’s that funny, Noah? Any reason why the word “plucking” is funny? Tell the class.

No, I thought not.”

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Marnie, a copy editor, uses wit to deflect in a Bridget Jones style of self-deprecation. This is a woman for whom three days of walking means taking twelve pairs of pants, three dresses and a laptop to work on To be fair, in a chapter entitled ‘Waterproof’ Marnie does go out and buy all the necessary gear, tramped over the little bridge they always have in Cotswolds to try out your new boots, and come away fully kitted out including a water bladder.

The green cagoule with the red beanie made her look like a stuffed olive, and the noise alone would send her mad, the roar of nylon against Gore-Tex. . . . In profile, if she held onto the straps of the rucksack, the low-slung bulk made her look like a tyrannosaurus. From the front, she was self-conscious about the way the straps framed her breasts, pushing them forwards in a single solid unit, like the nose of a submarine.

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Marnie deals with her loneliness through the use of humour and her own made-up language. It can also be her downfall.

And then the title. I enjoyed the fact that the cover has a pinpoint in the shape of Google’s on a map. You are here is how you are feeling right now, right here. And for both characters it was a better feeling than they had thought it would be. But both are stuck in the past and Micheal in particular is not present in the here and now, hoping for a chance to get back together with his wife. Looking back and looking forward but not HERE.

The story alternates between Michael and Marnie’s point of view so there is also something very literal about being here with one point of view and then switching over to the other person’s.

This is a slow love story, more life-like, moving at walking pace, with all of its embarassments and awkward feelings but we end with hope for them both. It is a book about getting lost and then finding your way back.