12 Hours to Say I Love You, Olivia Poulet and Laurence Dobiesz
At turns tender and touching, funny and frank, both a sweeping love story and an intense drama, the novel has all the hallmarks of great romantic fiction.
One Day, The Time Traveller’s Wife, PS I Love You... Modern romantic fiction has seen its fair share of classics this millennium and has created huge shoes to fill. Nicholls et al set the benchmark for the genre and it has proved a hard act to follow ever since. Step forward debut novelists Olivia Poulet and Laurence Dobiesz with 12 Hours to Say I Love You.
At turns tender and touching, funny and frank, both a sweeping love story and an intense drama, the novel has all the hallmarks of great romantic fiction. Told with a dual narrative centred on protagonists Pippa and Steven, and across two timelines –one in the present day as Pippa lies in a coma in hospital and the other over two decades of the couple’s love story –the novel impressively manages to cover the entire breadth and depth of a relationship and the full emotional rollercoaster. Readers are given the slow build and sedate development of a love story in the past narrative and the acute and profound feelings of a life woven together in the present narrative. There are the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, there are moments of utter joy and genuine humour and moments of heartache and despair, just as in real life. And holding it all together is the most perfect, yet also most believable, romance between two ordinary, relatable individuals.
That Poulet and Dobiesz have managed to pull all of this off is incredibly impressive, that they have done so in their debut is astonishing. Admittedly, as actors and writers for radio and screen, the pair have experience in tapping into life’s tapestry and crafting engaging narratives, but each medium has its own challenges and nuances and yet the duo seem utterly at home in fiction. Their manipulation of the timelines and their embodiment of the two central protagonists is superb, their storytelling and emotional integrity is authentic and their representation of human nature, love and the scope of romantic relationships is consummate. While there have been other novels which have centred on a character in a coma or a relationship traced across the years, and some critics may argue this is ‘just another love story’, for me a book that is as well-written, engaging and poignant as this deserves to be judged on its own merits. And as a modern romantic fiction, it undoubtedly excels.
My slight reservations would be that I found it took longer for me to relate to Pippa than Steven and she was a slightly thornier character than her counterpart, but this is purely subjective, and I suspect other readers may have similarly personal reactions to Steven. Also, as someone who has been reduced to a blubbering mess by a novel more often than I care to admit, whilst the novel plumbs the depths, and certainly plucked at my heart strings, I didn’t find myself welling up this time. Whether this is a negative or not, I’m not sure, but for me, the book had the full emotional range without pushing too far. But I’m really clutching at straws here in terms of a critique. Indeed, as far as I’m concerned, minor gripes aside, this is a really compelling debut and a book I’ll be quick to share.
