One Day, David Nicholls.

Book and Booze Club Tipple: Nothing less than 'a grocer's white wine' to start - and finish with a splash of Absinthe.

Fabulously, emotionally draining. 

I remember reading One Day for book club nearly two years ago now - and sobbing away just as my partner walked in the door from his daily two hour Canary Wharf train commute. With barely a glimpse he declared, "Not you too. Everyones got their heads buried in it" (+Craig Ward - genius cover design), then moaned about wheelie bags on the tube, quilted jackets and men in troubadour hats,  before his finely tuned commuter eyes noticed the mascara glistening down my face.

My attempt to explain just didn't translate. 

At some point, very, very early on, you become emotionally attached to the main characters, Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew.  They become, for want of a better word, a  'bitza': a bitza of every flawed friend, acquaintance, drunken shag, philosophising shag, never had shag, awkward experience, forgotten ambition and urban myth you've encountered during your twenties and thirties. A bitza broken mirror into your own life and others - and when a novel can do that, it really is something special.

I cried a ridiculous lot. 
Happy and sad. 
It just felt good.

One Day is so effortless to read, it feels like a guilty pleasure; but it shouldn't.  I understand the Emma Morley draw towards 'small print Russian novels', but sometimes you've just got to allow the author to lead, and let yourself go. And that is nothing to feel guilty about.

+David Nicholl's writing is 'red wine, chocolate and snuggle in bed' par-excellence. When confronted with the inevitable end and subsequent post 'one night' come down, I just had to top up with his 'The Understudy' in an attempt to cocoon myself in a Nicholl's  induced world for a little longer.  

Book and Booze Club loved this one too - a universal crowd pleaser. We paid homage to the ones that got away, laughed about  the lucky escapes and drank like we were infallible graduates.

Book and Booze Club Rating:  A thoroughly fabulous 5 boozy glasses full.

'One Day' Techy Speccy Blurby Bit.

• Author	David Nicholls
  Cover artist	Craig Ward
  Country	United Kingdom
  Language	English
  Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
  Publication date	11 June 2009
  Media type	Print
  Pages	448 pp
  ISBN	0-340-89696-5

YOU CAN LIVE YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOT REALISING THAT WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.

15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.

So where will they be on this one day next year? And the next year after that? 
And every year that follows?