David Nicholls

Trained as an actor and worked as a screenwriter before the novels took over, which explains a good deal about the construction. One Day visits the same pair on the same July date across twenty years, so everything important occurs in the gaps the reader has to fill.

Starter for Ten, Us and Sweet Sorrow surround it. Nicholls also adapts other people's work for television, including Patrick Melrose, and writes comedy that turns sad without announcing the change of direction. That refusal to signal is the whole technique.