A delighted David Nicholls, winner of the Oxford Mail/ Waterstone’s Book of the Year award, tells ANDREW FFRENCH about the challenges that lie ahead after his year of glory.

LIFE surely can’t get much better for author David Nicholls.

His novel One Day, a bittersweet love story, has scooped a host of awards.

Shortly after Mr Nicholls visited Waterstone’s in Broad Street to pick up the Oxford Mail/ Waterstone’s Oxford Book of the Year award, The Times weighed in with another accolade, naming One Day as The Times/WH Smith Paperback of the Year award.

The 43-year-old, who lives in North London with his partner Hannah, and children Max, five, and Romy, three, told The Guide he was enjoying all the attention.

But the excitement surrounding the novel, which has now sold more than one million copies in 33 different countries, has left him with no time to focus on any new writing projects.

Mr Nicholls, an accomplished screenwriter, has of course, penned the screenplay for the new film of the book starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.

And he was delighted to see members of the cast reading copies of the novel on set.

But what will please him most of all is closing the door on all the razzmatazz to concentrate on a new story, although he is aware that writing such a smash hit brings certain pressures.

“If you get a hit like this you have to make the most of it but you’ve got to accept that it will not happen again – it’s hard not to get panicky about the follow-up,” he admits.

“If you set out to repeat the success, you could be doomed to failure. I don’t know yet what my next novel will be about but it won’t be another love story.”

One Day tells the story of Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, two under-graduates who meet just as they are about to leave Edinburgh University in 1988.

The novel then revisits Emma and Dexter on St Swithin’s Day over the next 20 years until the story’s startling conclusion.

The novel is packed with reminders of Britain in the late eighties and early 1990s but it is not simply a nostalgia-fest for those who graduated around the same time.

Its appeal, with both male and female readers, has clearly been more universal, and Nicholls thinks he knows why.

“Bittersweet is a key word for the story,” he says.

“At times it is fond and nostalgic and at other times it is more melancholy and sad.

“It’s a novel about what might have been, and the mistakes and the choices we are forced to make.

“I remember having a conversation myself at university about where you imagine yourself at 40 and it never ends up like you predicted it. Regret is a central part of growing old.”

What Nicholls would clearly regret would be One Day creating a stumbling block in his writing career.

“I would like to have a long career and I don’t want this to be a huge anti-climax,” he tells The Guide.

Following such a big hit it’s only inevitable critics will sharpening their knives in readiness.

But Nicholls seems so level-headed that when we finish our interview I can’t help feeling that he could write a smash hit all over again.

It might not happen straight away, but one day who knows?

* One Day by David Nicholls, below, is published by Hodder, price £7.99