London, With Love by Sarra Manning #ABookADayInMay No.29

I’ve been e-friends with Sarra Manning for years, and have read some wonderful books on her recommendation – but somehow I have never got around to reading one of her own books. There are lots to choose from, and I chose London, With Love (2022) more or less at random from the ones available on Audible. I went in a little nervously, for reasons I will explain shortly, but I finished it a complete Manning convert. What a delightful book.

London, With Love tells the story of Jennifer (/Jen/Jenny, depending on her stage in life) and Nick over the course of two decades. They meet as teenagers in the early 1980s, where Jennifer is an intelligent, bookish, uncool girl desperately seeking somewhere to belong – and Nick is (in her eyes) a cool, handsome, unknowable boy far out of her league.

Somehow, despite the abyss she perceives between them, they do end up becoming friends – and then best friends. But while she never recovers from that crush that snowballs into love, she never wants to chance telling him about it. He seems simply a dream that can’t come true.

Not that Jennifer is entirely boy-focused. One of the most impressive things about London, With Love is that Manning creates a heroine who is completely fixated on a boy but is still independent, determined and ambitious. Her love may revolve around him, but her life does not.

As the years go by, we see Jennifer trying desperately to get into publishing, and find a role that fits the love of books that never leaves her. I relished every time Manning got in a literary reference, and you could tell that she the list of books Jennifer recommends for a teenage girl to read is a list close to Manning’s heart. And this isn’t one of those novels where the heroine achieves everything she puts her mind to – as someone who also tried to get work in editorial publishing, I recognised and winced at how many obstacles are in the way, and how publishing seems set up for people who can afford to do unpaid internships. I was following Jennifer’s path a few years later, but not a great deal had changed.

Nick and Jennifer lose touch after an early misunderstanding, but (unsurprisingly) he is not then absent from the novel. Over those 20 years, their paths cross time and again – the friendship is picked up, and sometimes it wanes and sometimes it is violently discarded. Sometimes we don’t see Jennifer for a handful of years at a time, and pick up with her at the next significant Nick encounter. Other partners come and go, sometimes people that Jennifer believes she could be happy with forever – but Nick is always there at the back of her mind. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are too hurt to talk to each other. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is awkward. While there is admittedly a little bit of coincidence about how often they run into each other, more often it is believable – through mutual secondary school friends, or because their parents have been talking to each other.

Another success in London, With Love is how both characters develop and mature, while still having recognisably the core of the person they always were. Some of the things that drive them change; some stay the same. And I loved Jennifer – annoying and foolish as she can often be, particularly when she ditches her friends to spend all her time with a new boyfriend (and hurrah, Sarra Manning, for pointing out this all-too-common unkindness!) – and I loved her because she is so vividly real.

And now onto the thing that made me a bit nervous. ‘London’ is right there in the title, and I knew that different tube stops and underground lines would be significant features of the novel. Since I don’t really like London, or any city, I wondered if that would put me off. And, yes, I’m sure Londoners or Londonophiles would recognise a lot of sites and situations in this novel that passed me by, but it is not so dominant that the country mouse feels alienated.

Similarly, I was born in 1985 and so quite a few years behind Jennifer – the fashions, songs, politics, experiences that she has in her teens and 20s would doubtless be nostalgia-inducing for some readers. I enjoyed them without that same sense of recognition.

Perhaps the perfect reader is a Londoner approximately the same age as Jennifer (i.e. in their 50s now), but it is certainly not a requisite to lap it all up. I want to write something about the patriarchy and how David Nicholls’ One Day is a huge deal when this book has a similar sort of theme and is every bit as good, but that’s a whole other essay that you can imagine for yourselves.

What a lovely, memorable time I’ve spent getting to know these characters, and I’m very open for recommendations for which Sarra Manning book to read next.