One Day in December

A friend pressed this book into my hands in late November and said, read it before Christmas or do not bother. That sounded bossy, but she had a point. This is a December book down to its bones, and it worked on me best with cold windows and early dark. It was Josie Silver's debut, first published in 2018, and it became a Reese's Book Club pick and a bestseller in more than twenty countries. My copy is the Broadway Books edition, 416 pages, and I finished it in four sittings, which tells you most of what you need about the pacing of the first third.

The setup is the kind you can explain in one breath. Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight only happens in films. Then, through a misted bus window on a snowy December day in London, she sees a man at a bus stop and knows, instantly, that he matters. Their eyes meet. The bus pulls away. She spends the next year looking for him in every cafe and queue in the city, and then she finds him at a Christmas party, where her best friend Sarah introduces him as her new boyfriend. His name is Jack. Of course it is.

What follows is ten years of these three people circling each other. Silver tells it in alternating voices, Laurie and Jack chapter by chapter, checking in December after December. The cover copy calls it two people and ten chances, and that is honest. This is not a book about one missed connection. It is about what happens when the connection keeps refusing to die.

A face in a bus window

Laurie James is twenty something, sharing a London flat with Sarah, her best friend since they were young, working a temp job on a hotel front desk that she hates. She wants to write. She is going home for Christmas with her parents, her bag packed, her flat already feeling empty because Sarah has left for the holidays. The bus is crowded and germy and slow. Then it stops, she glances out, and there he is.

Silver does this scene well because she keeps it small. No slow motion, no orchestra. Laurie notices his coat, his grin, the way he looks straight at her like he recognizes her too. He steps forward as if he might board. The doors close. The bus moves. That is the whole miracle, about four seconds long, and Laurie cannot let it go.

The year that follows is my favorite part of the book. Laurie and Sarah name him Bus Boy and make finding him a joint project. They scan pubs. They take different routes. Sarah is all in, the perfect wing woman, which will matter later in a way that made me groan out loud on the train. Laurie builds the stranger into a standard no real man can meet, and she half knows she is doing it. There is a nice honesty in these chapters. Laurie is lonely, not tragic. She dates a little. She works. She just keeps one eye on every doorway.

I should say the narration helps a lot here. Laurie tells her own chapters with warmth and self mockery, and when Jack's chapters arrive, we learn he remembers the bus too. He was the man on the pavement. He saw her. So the reader carries a secret for hundreds of pages: both of them know, and neither says so for a very long time.

The worst Christmas party surprise

A year after the bus, at Sarah's Christmas drinks, Sarah grabs Laurie's arm and pulls her toward her new boyfriend, and it is him. Bus Boy has a name, Jack O'Mara, and a girlfriend, and the girlfriend is Laurie's best friend and flatmate.

This is the scene the whole book depends on, and Silver stages it with cruelty and care. Laurie smiles. She shakes his hand. She says nothing about the bus, because what could she possibly say that would not poison Sarah's happiness on the spot? Jack says nothing either. Later we learn in his chapters that he recognized Laurie at once and chose silence too, hoping she would not place him.

I believed Laurie's choice completely and judged Jack's a little, which turned out to be the pattern of the book for me. Laurie stays quiet to protect Sarah. Jack stays quiet to protect himself and his comfortable new relationship, and he keeps that habit for years. Still, in the moment, both of them smile through the party, and Sarah glows, and the reader wants to climb into the page and hand Laurie a very large drink.

What comes next is a long stretch of forced togetherness. Sarah, delighted to have her two favorite people adore each other, engineers trio dinners and weekends and holidays. Laurie tries to keep her distance without seeming cold. She invents errands. She leaves rooms. It does not work because Sarah loves a group outing the way some people love karaoke, unstoppable and sincere. So Laurie learns Jack the way you learn a song you never chose: his chat, his moods, his habit of showing up late with a story that charms the table. He learns her too. They become real friends, which is worse than not knowing him at all.

There is a quiet early beat I kept thinking about. Laurie tells Jack about her younger sister Ginny, who died when they were children, something she does not hand out to just anyone. Afterward she feels she has crossed a line, giving him a piece of herself that belongs outside the friend zone. Small crossings like that pile up. Nothing dramatic happens for a long while. Everything loads.

Two secrets and a kiss nobody mentions

The middle years run on alcohol and almosts. Laurie and Jack orbit, pulled together by Sarah's plans and their own gravity, then yanked apart by guilt. One night after a scare involving Laurie's father and his heart, Laurie kisses Jack, or lets a kiss happen, depending on how generous you feel toward her. She tells him afterward to forget it. He cannot. She cannot. They both pretend with total commitment.

Silver is good at writing the particular torture of wanting someone at a dinner table while their partner passes you the potatoes. Laurie starts policing herself: do not sit next to him, do not laugh too long, do not accept a lift. Jack, in his chapters, admits the pull and then talks himself around it. He loves Sarah. Sarah is bright and fun and good to him. Why would he blow that up over a feeling from a bus stop years ago? His reasons sound sensible and slightly greasy at the same time, and I think that is deliberate. Jack is the book's weakest link as a person for a long stretch, and Silver does not hide it.

Laurie eventually does the sanest thing available. She leaves the country for a while. A trip to Thailand with vague plans and a lighter suitcase, a deliberate step out of the triangle to clear her head. In Thailand she meets Oscar. He is steady, kind, employed, interested, everything Jack is not at that point, and the timing does the rest. They keep dating back in London. For the first time in years, Laurie builds something that has nothing to do with a bus.

I found these chapters a relief and a test. A relief because Laurie finally stops circling Jack. A test because the reader can feel the book holding its breath, waiting to see if Oscar is real or just a very nice waiting room.

Oscar, a wedding, and the truth told too late

Oscar deserves a fair description, because the book needs him to be genuinely good, or Laurie's choice means nothing. He is warm and stable and fond of Laurie in an easy, public way. He meets Sarah and Jack and gets on fine with Sarah, while Jack dislikes him on sight and barely bothers to hide it. Jealousy looks ugly on Jack, and his chapters around this time are not his finest. He sulks through dinners. Laurie sees it and tells herself it proves nothing.

The proposal comes, and Laurie says yes. Here Silver makes Laurie do the thing readers will argue about: she finally tells Sarah the truth, that Jack was Bus Boy all along, right before the wedding. Years of silence, then honesty at the worst possible moment. Sarah is furious, not only about Jack but about the years of lying by omission, and she does not come to the wedding. The maid of honor's absence sits over the whole day like weather. Laurie notes it during the toasts. Jack notices too, and he steps in to give a speech in Sarah's place, which sets the room buzzing about exactly the thing everyone was trying not to see.

I have read complaints that Laurie should have spoken up years earlier or never, and both sides have a point. Telling Sarah on the eve of the wedding is selfish timing dressed as honesty. But keeping it forever would have been worse, and Silver lets the fallout land. The friendship cracks. The wedding goes ahead with a shadow across it. Laurie marries a good man while her oldest friendship sits in pieces, and the book does not pretend that is a clean win.

One more beat worth naming: through all of this, Laurie keeps writing and working toward the career she wants, and her New Year check ins show small professional steps alongside the romantic chaos. The book never becomes a career novel, but Laurie is not only a girlfriend-shaped person waiting for fate. That mattered to me more than once.

Accidents, new men, and everyone leaving London

Then life does what it does in long books and rearranges the board. Jack has a car accident on a night he is running late to dinner, and the timing could not be worse. He is a DJ, between jobs, counting on a new slot, and the crash damages his hearing on one side badly enough to cost him the opportunity. He turns miserable and sharp tongued, snapping at Sarah and Laurie both. Grief for his old plans curdles into self pity, and Silver lets him be genuinely unpleasant for a stretch. Readers who already doubted Jack will find their doubts confirmed here.

The accident brings Luke into the story, because Luke is the one who finds Jack, gets him help, and phones Sarah. That is how Sarah meets her future husband: through Jack's worst night. I liked this turn more than I expected. It gives Sarah a storyline that is not only reacting to Laurie and Jack, and Luke reads as decent and direct, a man who says what he means, which must have felt like cold water after Jack. When Sarah ends things with Jack, her reasoning is plain. He is not fully her person. He thinks of himself first. She deserves the whole thing, not most of it.

Geography finishes what honesty started. Jack takes radio work in Edinburgh and moves north. Sarah goes to Australia with Luke. Laurie stays in London with Oscar, but the marriage thins. Oscar's promotion pulls him abroad for much of the week, Laurie will not build her life around following him, and the distance between them stops being only miles. They divorce, quietly and without villains. By the later chapters all three of the original trio are scattered, older, and single except for Sarah, and Laurie is alone in a flat that feels too big, listening to the radio.

I want to be honest that this stretch sagged for me in places. The years blur, some Decembers feel like variations on the same party with different coats, and Jack's chapters circle the same regrets. A few coincidences stack up in ways that ask a lot: the accident delivering Luke, the job in Edinburgh happening to be radio, everyone single at the same convenient time. Romance runs on coincidence and I accept that, but twice I caught myself raising an eyebrow. The book earns patience more than it demands it, if that makes sense. I kept going for Laurie and Sarah, not for plot mechanics.

The phone call, the train, and what I would warn you about

The ending is built around one set piece, and it is a good one. Laurie, alone one evening, tunes in to Jack's Edinburgh radio show. On impulse she phones in under a false name and tells the host her story: years ago she saw a man through a bus window, loved him, never told him, and now wonders if she wasted a decade. Jack knows at once that it is her. You can feel it through the radio static. He answers carefully, on air, telling the caller she should tell the man how she feels before the chance closes for good. Listeners melt. Clips travel. The mystery woman becomes a small internet sensation overnight, with everyone asking who she is.

Sarah knows. Sarah, who has rebuilt her friendship with Laurie by this point through honest fights and slow repair, does the loveliest thing in the book: she sends Laurie a one way train ticket to Edinburgh. No note full of advice, just the ticket. Laurie goes, half terrified, through stations and snow, and even the taxi driver at the other end has heard the call and knows where she is headed. Then it is just the two of them at last, no partners, no audience, no more pretending, and they say the true things years late. They kiss in the cold. It lands.

So here is my fair criticism, all in one place. Jack is difficult to root for across the middle, passive where Laurie is at least trying, and his charm offensive in the final chapters does not fully erase seasons of stringing two women along. Sarah forgives faster than real life usually allows, and Oscar, kind as he is, exists mostly to prove a point about Laurie before exiting. The book also leans on the December frame so hard that off season life sometimes feels skipped. If you dislike love triangles on principle, or you need both leads to behave well, this will annoy you for 200 pages before it rewards you.

But here is what I kept, and why I am glad my friend bossed me into it. The friendship is treated as seriously as the romance, and Sarah is never reduced to an obstacle. The alternating narration means we watch Jack fail in his own words, which is braver than a villain edit. The ten year structure shows how people actually change, slowly and then in jumps, through jobs and flats and funerals and moves. And the ending, for all its public spectacle, resolves in private, two people finally honest. Read it in December if you can, with something warm. Forgive Jack slowly, the way Laurie does, and enjoy watching Sarah get the life she chose.