Well Matt Cain has done it again! Another fantastic story from what is becoming my favourite author. One love tells the story of Danny and Guys friendship spanning twenty years. It explores unrequited love and the trauma of growing up gay and how it can effect self worth.
When Danny firsts meets Guy at Manchester University he helps him come out. He also falls in love with him but the story isn’t quite so straightforward as we are never sure if Guys feels the same. Over the years their friendship has many ups and downs until their twenty year reunion at Manchester Pride.
When I first started reading this I thought it was going to be a predictable gay romcom. How wrong I was! I really should have known better of Matt Cain. It is funny, tragic, moving and very thought provoking. Matt has a great insight into the human Psyche and draws on his own experiences of discovering his own sexuality and the bullying and trauma that went with that along with the impact that has on one’s life and relationships.
I completed this book within three nights. I’ll blame Matt for my lack of sleep but it was soooo worth it!

One Love is a novel about two old friends spending the weekend together at Manchester Pride, with one hoping it'll be the start of something new for their friendship. Danny met Guy when they started at Manchester uni in 2002, with Danny excited to be able to finally be out to the world and Guy navigating actually telling people he's gay. Now it's 2022 and after years of ups and downs, Danny and Guy are still friends, returning to Manchester for Pride, but Danny wants to tell Guy that he's always been in love with him, but he knows it'll change things forever.

The story of this book was what drew me in, the idea of queer friendship and yearning, though the narrative is actually a lot more complex than a simple friends-to-lovers type romance set over many years. That was definitely refreshing, and I do think that the ending's conclusion, though maybe not what everyone might expect from this type of book, engaged much more interestingly with the complexity of gay life and love than similar books might. Blurred definitions of relationships and friendships and building the kinds of connections you want weren't things I expected from the title and blurb, but I appreciated it and felt it worked well for the story.

The book uses a split timeline to tell the story, combining the present day of 2022 with flashbacks to the years previous and charting the friendship of Danny and Guy, and how their lives have gone since university. It is mostly focused on Danny's perspective through the third person narration, though sometimes it jumps to Guy's perspective, and this disparity does make it occasionally a bit confusing to suddenly realise you're meant to be in Guy's thoughts, not Danny's. The time jumps sometimes weren't apparent either, but that might've just been related to the formatting when reading it digitally. The writing style was something else that didn't always do justice to the book, with a tendency to over-describe things and fall back on stereotypes.

Stereotypes are something that become a theme in the book, with attempts to push back at ideas of stereotypes and if people can actually be them. Danny gets a lot of stick in the book for seeming like a stereotype when he's just living his life, and it seems like there's a message around questioning if it is useful to see real people as being stereotypes or not. However, basically all of the characters in the book are shown to be stereotypes in various ways, so I'm not sure how successfully the book questions them and how much it uses stereotypes in place of complexity. The book addresses in some ways Danny's struggles with self-image and internalised fatphobia, but ultimately it felt like the book swept this out of the way, and it would've been interesting to see this element, as well as the way the characters use alcohol and drugs to escape, made into something more nuanced in the narrative.

One Love is a book that makes me feel conflicted, because it captures some of the complexity of queer love and friendship, whilst not really addressing the complexity of much else. I think plenty of people will find it powerful and maybe revelatory, but I didn't enjoy the writing style and I felt the way that it generally engaged with LGBTQ people and issues was often too simplistic.

A brand new matt Cain book? Just what I needed for a chilly winter evening.

I'd read that this was a bit like David Nicholls' One Day, and I was a bit apprehensive as I never fully got into that book. I felt it was all a bit slow. And I was worried that this would be similar. But I needn't have worried. I mean yes, for me, no explosive action happens in it, but that doesn't mean it's boring. It's a slow burn, giving you time to really develop a fondness for these characters and their journeys, and it's perfectly executed.

People think this is just a piece of entertaining fiction - which it is - and nothing of consequence. But it's more important than that. It breaks my heart to know that this isn't just fiction, people have to go through this day after day, just because of who they love. This kind of thing should be relegated to fiction, to fantasy worlds.

I completely recognise that as a heterosexual woman, I have never been put in a position where my sexuality or the gender of my partner has been put under scrutiny. But it's books like these, that contain openly gay characters, but in the same way that mainstream books market openly straight characters...I think it's a lot more important than "just" a piece of entertainment.

It's set over two time periods, the early 2000s whilst the two protagonists are at University and the years following graduation, and 2022. We get to see the two men grow up individually and together. It makes them so likeable and so detailed that it's hard not to root for them. It also allows us to see the change in LGBTQ+ attitudes over those two decades.

Like the work of the aforementioned David Nicholls or Nicholas Sparks, Matt is not apologetic about the romance and the light and likes and loves and positivity in his books. But he balances that with very human feelings and situations, especially around LGBTQ+ elemenst.

It felt so real, like I wanted these people to be in my world. They're not always likeable. They're immature and they can be nasty and angry and obliviously cruel, but that's what makes them - and I know I keep repeating myself - but real. No-one is 100% a good guy in life, we are all sometimes the villain, and that's what Matt has achieved here. Danny and Guy are both the hero and the villain in their respective stories, and it's just about balancing that.

Not to be dismissive or anything as he's obviously worked really hard on it, but for me, the plot is inconsequential. He is such a master at creating well-developed, flawed, likeable, and very real characters, that I would just gladly read a study of people by him for 400+ pages.

It was really moving. I wasn't expecting it to be so. But it really is just so beautiful that I found myself welling up on more than one occasion. There's just so much heart in it. I won't give too much away as I think the effect comes from experiencing it yourself, btu there are passages in it - particularly towards the end - that just, I felt in my heart and my soul. There's this nostalgia, but it's not always a positive one, and it is so strong. I predict a bestseller come January.

It is a truly heartwarming, cosy, intense, strong, sad, happy, fun, entertaining, beautiful, important, comforting hug of a book.

Knowing Manchester well, I enjoyed it as the setting to this book. I liked the dual timelines and how eventually it all became one.

This is the first novel I've read by the author and I'll definitely be seeking out his back catalogue after this.
It's set in 2002 and 2022 and the years in between, when Danny and Guy meet during Freshers week at Manchester University. The novel chronicles their friendship during the intervening years culminating in a weekend in 2022 at Manchester Pride.
I absolutely loved One Love, I was drawn into the characters, particularly Danny, from the start and the Manchester setting was very nostalgic as I was a student there the decade before the novel is set. The author excellently portrays what it's like to be an outsider because of both sexuality and class and chronicles changing attitudes to sexuality over the first two decades of the twenty first century. For me it was also a portrayal of huge changes in Manchester that have taken place during this century and the author really brought the city alive.
Most of all this is Danny's story, it's often emotional and is told with such love and affection that I felt bereft when I finished the novel.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this digital ARC.
4.5 stars

I enjoyed both Albert Entwistle and Becoming Ted so I was excited to read this, it’s very different and pushes the boundaries but it’s a very strong and thought provoking read. This is one of those books you’ve really got to read to the end to fully appreciate and although the first half was good I found the way I looked at Danny’s story in the second half changed and this is when it really took off for me. There’s some fantastic points raised in this about changing attitudes both in general around LGBTQ movement and society, and the characters in this too as they look back over the years and consider what’s made them who they are today and they make for a very solid read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Headline for approving my request to read an arc of this book

One Love is the story of Guy and Danny who have been friends since they met at university twenty years ago. The pair bonded quickly over their shared sexuality and the need to be around someone else who could understand them after being unable to for all of their life previously. Twenty years later the two meet up to go and experience Manchester Pride all over again and this time try and find the courage to tell the other how they have really felt all of those years.