One Day Themes

David Nicholls’s One Day is a novel about the relationship between the book’s main characters, Emma and Dexter, which evolves over the course of almost two decades. The novel charts how Emma and Dexter form a friendship and eventually a marriage, exploring how both characters seek out different types of relationships at different points in their lives, with the recklessness and confusion of youth giving way to more stable relationships later in life. In…

One Day is a novel full of characters who come from very different social classes. Dexter, for example, is from a wealthy family, and this affects both the way he goes through life and his opinions on various subjects. By contrast, Emma comes from a working-class background, and this means that she has a very different experience in life compared to Dexter, though they both start out at the University of Edinburgh. Even when…

At various points in David Nicholls’s One Day, the character Dexter suffers from addictions to alcohol and cigarettes. Although Emma doesn’t struggle with addiction in quite the same way, she too finds herself dependent on things like cigarettes to cope with acute anxiety, like when she learns Dexter is engaged and going to be a father. Emma and Dexter are also caught in other self-destructive cycles that they struggle to break free from…