One Day

You'll laugh, you'll cry.

This is a lovely book both funny and moving and brilliantly read by Anna Bentinck. It charts a period of 20 years in the lives of two friends revisiting their lives on the same date in each successive year and with alternating (often contrasting) viewpoints of the same events. It sounds gimmicky (but then so did The Time Traveller's Wife) but works well and by the end of the novel you will feel as if you are leaving old friends behind. Anna Bentinck inhabits both characters convincingly and if you enjoy her reading then try her version of Hilary Mantel's "Beyond Black" - another funny and moving book with a dual narrative structure.

31 of 32 people found this review helpful

One Day went on and on and on......

Thank heavens there are some negative reviews as this was one of my least favourite downloads. In the end, I got hold of a copy of the book and sped read the last few chapters as I couldn't take any more. Two dreary people for whom I had no sympathy and would quite happily have ditched after Year 1. I am so much in the minority as there are millions of fans of this book - just not me! Sorry!

29 of 31 people found this review helpful

An excellent audiobook

This is not the sort of book I would normally read, but it was going for a song in the Audible summer sale, so I thought I'ld give it a whirl.

I'm glad I did so. It is an engaging and bittertsweet story, and with the book comprising as it does largely of dialogue or inner monologue, it is perfectly suited for audio. And the narration is just superb - beautifully paced and with the characters brought brilliantly to life. In fact it is for me one of those books that works far better as audio than reading for yourself.

17 of 19 people found this review helpful

Dismal and Dull!

Simlar to some of the other negative reviewers, I have the feeling that I must have missed something in this book seeing some of the higher starred reviews. Firstly I thought that the narrator did an excellent job of the characters, I found her easy to listen to. I also enjoyed the first section of the book, but having finished it yesterday, and found that I was becoming more and more impatient with the second half, and just wanted it to be over. Since finishing the book, I have subsequently felt emotionally manipulated and melancoly about it and annoyed with myself that I did not give it up earlier. If you are happy to read about constant and repeated mistakes and errors of people under the influence of alcohol, and missed opportunities then this might be the book for you. For me the story was too dismal to be entertaining and ultimately too contrived and miserable to give any satisfaction ..sorry! My worst download to date.

15 of 17 people found this review helpful

disapointed

sorry I didn't really like this book.....I found it anoying and espesially at the end very depressing.

8 of 9 people found this review helpful

Nope - just didn't get into it at all...

I gave this over 7 hours and found I really didn't want to hear any more. Couldn't stand either of the main characters - he was a weak, addictive, self-centred user of both people and stimulants. She has a chip the size of a brick on her shoulder, resorts to snarky comedy to avoid any commitment, and when I stopped listening, she'd been in a 2 or more year relationship with a man she didn't like, respect or apparently want. So not for me, although given the screaming adulation on Amazon and elsewhere I appreciate that I am in a distinct minority!

15 of 18 people found this review helpful

emotional roller-coaster of a book

I just finished this emotional roller-coaster of a book. The idea of revisiting the lives of the main characters on the same day every year for almost 20 years was so well done, all the important gaps filled so well that you feel you knew all there was to know about them... this was a very difficult book to put down and I became very emotionally and intellectually invested. It made me question my life choices, and I cried with Dex and Em when they were sad, I yearned when they were yearning.
The narrator is very good, although I liked her Em voice much more than her Dex voice (although this may also be because Dex is not as immediately likable as Em).

11 of 13 people found this review helpful

Hilarious, heartbreaking and painfully truthful.

Like Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, this audiobook has the two most perfect readers which, good as the book must be on the page, brought the book alive in the most engaging and satisfying way. I can honestly say I laughed out loud so often in public I had to stop listening, and the end of the book literally stopped me in my tracks as I was walking home. The story begins in the 1980's when I was the age of the two main characters, and so it had a personal interest for me. I liked the fact that the background of their stories is quietly political. It is a deceptively easy listen. The structure is complex and yet seems light and simple. Human emotions are examined with great tenderness and truth. Despite all the humour, the writer shows the quiet tragedies of the lives of ordinary people. David Nicholls says he is inspired by Thomas Hardy and although that may seem pretentious for such a 'light' book, in fact Nicholls has written something both profound and quite beautiful.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Memorable, compulsive reading.

If you could sum up One Day in three words, what would they be?

Hedonism, 90s, youth. (Aspiration, ambition, pressure.) (Stress, anxiety, loathing.) (Capricious lady fate.)

What was one of the most memorable moments of One Day?

Well since I can't spoil the ending, I'll say when they visit Arthur's Seat, or when they're wading in the water during their holiday - really each year/chapter has a memorable, central theme which is rich in imagery, time and place, so sticks in your mind.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

N/A, she did a good job with the accents and personality changes as the characters age - didn't put a foot wrong.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

It is a film, but I haven't seen it: 'a connection you can't miss'?

Any additional comments?

I listened to this last year, and I can still recall it vividly, thanks to the writing style: modern, humorous, cynical, clever, approachable, wry; and the changing perspectives so we get to know these two characters inside and out. A reviewer wrote, "in spite of its comic gloss, One Day is really about loneliness and the casual savagery of fate; the tragic gap between youthful aspiration and the compromises that we end up tolerating" - that's about it, really.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Better each time

This is the second time I have listened to this audio book and it brought back so many memories. I still cried numerous times even though I knew the story. The narrator is superb and the characters so life like. May have to give it another play in another's few years.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful