Love, Unscripted

Nicholls’s inventive, clever debut follows a lovelorn London film projectionist between the 2008 and 2012 U.S. presidential elections. In 2012, cinephile Nick Marcet recounts his erstwhile relationship with Ellie Brown, a budding journalist with the “same quizzical eyebrows and flawless skin” as “Broadcast News–era Holly Hunter.” Nick met Ellie on the night Barack Obama was first elected president, at a mutual friend’s party as the gathered Londoners eagerly await the vote count and quaintly debate Obama’s leftist bona fides in relation to their own country’s politicians. Occasional omniscient “intermissions” offer poignant snapshots of their love’s growth and limitations, due to Nick’s obsessive digressions into film references and Ellie’s unhealed childhood trauma over the avoidable loss of her brother to appendicitis. As Nick struggles to piece together an explanation for the breakup, he wonders what someone of Ellie’s “caliber” ever saw in someone so “bog standard” as himself. He replays the scenes of their fights, still unable to see how Ellie’s decision to leave London for a career opportunity with the Associated Press in New York could have benefited both of them. Nicholls writes with verve and wit, elevating the unsurprising plot with infectious film commentary, the pratfalls of young love, and a time capsule of London life before Brexit. Nick Hornby fans will appreciate this. (Feb.)