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Nicholls sets two wary, middle-aged Londoners — a withdrawn teacher and a recently divorced cartographer — on a coast-to-coast walking route across northern England, using the daily grind of mileage and weather as a slow-release device for intimacy neither character can manage through direct conversation. The book leans on Nicholls's familiar comic timing and eye for the small humiliations of dating past forty, and critics were split on whether the destination justifies the walk. The novel's real subject is loneliness rather than romance, and it's most convincing when it lingers on the characters' solitary habits rather than pushing them toward each other.