Us
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acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Hannah MacDonald, Michael McCoy, Roanna Benn, Damian Barr and Elizabeth Kilgarriff for their advice and encouragement. Also Paula Alexandre, Rhiannon Rose White, Malcolm Logan, Sadie Holland, Natalie Doherty, Dr Claire Isaac, Alison Moulding, Grenville Fox, Jane Brook and Andrew Shennan for their expertise. Any errors are all mine.
I’m grateful to Jonny Geller, Kirsten Foster and all at Curtis Brown, my editor Nick Sayers, Laura Macdougall, Emma Knight, Auriol Bishop and all the team at Hodder & Stoughton. Also Amber Burlinson, Ayse Tashkiran, Sophie Heawood and, in particular, Erica Stewart and Sands, the stillbirth and neonatal death charity (https://www.uk-sands.org/).
Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art was a great help, as were Wikipedia and Google Maps, and I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letter to Sophie Peabody in Evan S. Connell’s fine novel, Mr Bridge. The epigraph from Far From The Tree is reprinted by permission of The Random House Group, Lorrie Moore and Philip Larkin by permission of Faber, Penelope Fitzgerald by permission of 4th Estate and Elizabeth Taylor by permission of Virago, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group. While I’ve done my best to make Douglas’ journey accurate, I’ve sometimes made minor adjustments to reality. For instance, it is not possible to see the Prado from the Plaza de Cibeles, and neither is there a bench in front of Las Meninas.
Finally, love and gratitude is due to Hannah Weaver for her patience and humour, her encouragement and inspiration.
The Grand Tour
About the Author
David Nicholls trained as an actor before making the switch to writing. His TV credits include the third series of Cold Feet, Rescue Me, and I Saw You, as well as a much-praised modern version of Much Ado About Nothing and an adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, both for BBC TV. His most recent script for television was the BBC drama The 7:39, starring Olivia Colman and David Morrissey. David has continued to write for film and TV as well as writing novels, and he has twice been nominated for BAFTA awards.
David’s bestselling first novel, STARTER FOR TEN, was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in 2004, and David has written the screenplays for film versions of both STARTER FOR TEN (released in 2006, starring James McAvoy) and THE UNDERSTUDY (not yet released).
David Nicholls’ third novel, ONE DAY, was published in hardback in 2009 to extraordinary critical acclaim, and stayed in the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list for ten weeks on publication. It has since gone on to sell over two and a half million copies and has been translated into thirty-seven languages. ONE DAY won the 2010 Galaxy Book of the Year Award. David wrote the screenplay for Lone Scherfig’s film adaptation starring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, which was released in 2010.
Find out more about David Nicholls:
Visit his website at www.davidnichollswriter.com
Like his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/DavidNichollsAuthor
Follow the journey of Us at
/davidnichollsauthor
#allaboutUs
‘I need some fresh air. Goodnight.
Goodnight. I’ll find my own way home.’