‘You Are Here’ by David Nicholls     (2024) – 349 pages

Here is a quick amusing light novel about Marnie and Michael.

Marnie is 38, recovering from a disastrous marriage, and spends nearly all her time holed up in her London apartment reading for her job as a proofreader and copy editor for publishers. For this job, she does not need to leave her apartment.

Michael is 42, and his marital problems are not so straightforward. He is still married and still thinks he loves his wife even though they are separated. Michael is the outdoorsy type and loves to climb the steep hills and mountains in Cumbria and Yorkshire in northern England around his home. Michael teaches geography in high school and often takes his students on hikes.

“At home he was merely lonely. A stepping outside transformed loneliness to solitude, a far more dignified state because it was his choice.”

He plans a walk across northern England from west coast to east coast and having others join him for at least part of the hike. An older woman friend of Michael’s who also happens to know Marnie decides this would be a good opportunity for Marnie to get out of her apartment and meet some new people. Marnie reluctantly agrees to go. There will also be another young man, Conrad, on the hike who is obviously there only to pick up women.

“He was neat and trim, and easy access to moisturizers had given him extraordinary skin, a smoothness untouched by time and life, as if he were his own action figure.”

I liked this bitchiness in these portrayals. Sorry. If you don’t have a bitchy sense of humor you probably won’t like this book.

Marnie does not enjoy all this mountain hiking. When the walk gets too steep she starts swearing at Michael and can’t stop swearing.

However we all know where all this is heading between the houseplant Marnie and the mountain climber Michael. There is that mysterious something in the air.

‘He is a nice man,’ said Cleo.

‘He is,’ said Marnie, ‘Very nice’, and fell silent, because niceness was something that was both rare and also hard to talk about.

‘You Are Here’ is a quick fun read on the order of works by Nick Hornby. Don’t be daunted by the page count as there are tons of white space and you will speed through this novel rapidly.

‘You Are Here’ is the kind of light “opposites attract” novel that in some ways is much deeper than many much more serious novels.

A novel like this would almost always wind up with a wedding, but it is the 2020s and we are all obviously way too cool for that.

Grade :     A