The Story in Brief
Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew spend the night together after their Edinburgh graduation ceremony on July 15th, 1988 — and almost but not quite become a couple. David Nicholls's novel then checks in on them every year on that same date for the next two decades, watching them drift apart and toward each other as their lives diverge radically: Emma struggling through unglamorous jobs toward a life she actually wants, Dexter burning brightly and then burning out through television fame, drink, and a series of bad choices. It is a novel about time, about the people we almost were with, and about what we owe the people who knew us before we became ourselves. Lone Scherfig's 2011 film, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess, is a sincere adaptation of a novel whose formal genius is almost impossible to bring to screen.
Key Differences
The annual structure
Nicholls's central formal device — one chapter per year, always July 15th — is the novel's engine and its emotional argument. Over twenty chapters you accumulate an understanding of Emma and Dexter that feels genuinely longitudinal: you notice what has changed, what hasn't, what each of them is not saying. The film compresses this into two hours of montage and selected scenes, which captures the shape of the story but cannot replicate the specific weight of watching a single day repeated across two decades. The structure is the meaning, and film cannot hold it.
The casting problem
Anne Hathaway is a gifted actress in the wrong role. Emma Morley is specifically, essentially, emphatically English — her class anxiety, her Yorkshire roots, her particular brand of self-deprecating Northern wit are load-bearing elements of who she is and why Dexter finds her both attractive and threatening. Hathaway's accent was widely criticised on the film's release and the criticism was fair: not because American actors can't do British accents, but because this particular accent, this particular regional identity, is too central to Emma to be approximated. The Netflix series cast Ambika Mod, who is note-perfect.
Dexter's decline
The novel spends considerable time with Dexter at his worst — the television career curdling, the drinking, the specific self-pity of a handsome man who has coasted on charm and is now watching it expire. Nicholls is merciless about this in ways the film softens: Jim Sturgess is too appealing to fully convince as a man making himself genuinely difficult to love. The book's Dexter earns his eventual redemption through a longer, uglier fall.
Emma's interiority
The novel switches perspective between Emma and Dexter depending on the year, giving us access to both inner lives in turn. Emma's chapters are often funnier and sharper than Dexter's — her observations about her own ambitions and failures have a quality of honest self-examination that is among the best things in the book. The film collapses this dual perspective into a more conventionally external view of both characters, and Emma's intelligence becomes something we're told about rather than something we experience.
The ending
The novel's devastating turn arrives without warning and lands with full force precisely because Nicholls has spent four hundred pages making you believe in these two people. The film's equivalent moment works — it is hard for it not to — but it carries less weight because the preceding two hours have not built the same foundation of accumulated time. You are sad; in the book, you are bereft.
Should You Read First?
Yes — emphatically. The novel is one of the best British romances of the 2000s and its formal structure is genuinely irreplaceable. Read first and the film becomes a flawed but affectionate companion. If you want a screen version after the book, the 2024 Netflix series with Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall is considerably more successful than the 2011 film and worth your time.
Nicholls's novel accumulates two decades of feeling through a formal device that film simply cannot replicate in two hours. Scherfig's adaptation is earnest and well-intentioned but never solves the casting problem at its centre, and the compression that montage requires strips the story of the weight it needs. Read the book. It will wreck you in the right way. The film is a lesser version of something great.