My friend in London sent me a screenshot last week. It showed a countdown banner from a shoe shop, “Singles’ Day, 11.11.”, and underneath she had typed: “Apparently being single now gets me money off trainers.” She is the friend who keeps asking me for funny books about dating, so she knows by now that she gets reading lists from me instead of sympathy.
The day itself is older and nicer than the banners. Students at Nanjing University came up with it in 1993 and picked 11 November because the date is four ones standing in a row. It was meant as a day to celebrate being on your own. The shopping came later.
I should say that I am not single and have not been for a long time. But I am the person my single friends borrow books from, and over the years the same eight have kept leaving my shelf. Some come back with wine stains. One has not come back at all.
Two classics that still hold up
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding turns thirty this year, and I expected it to have aged badly. Parts of it have: the calorie counting is hard to read now. But what I had forgotten is how little of the book is about Mark Darcy and how much of it is about the friends on the other end of the phone. It is a novel about a support system, with a love story attached.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby is the one I hand to men, and to women who want to understand them. Rob owns a failing record shop in north London, has just been left by Laura, and responds by ranking his five worst break-ups and looking up the women involved. He starts out as the injured party. By the end he has worked out who all five stories have in common.
Two that are not about finding anyone
Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love is a memoir, not a novel: bad dates, worse flats, a lot of cheap wine. I give it to friends in their twenties because of where it lands. The great loves of her life so far, she decides, were the women she lived with.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is not a dating book at all, and that is why it is here. I reviewed it years ago and cried into a cold cup of tea. It is about loneliness, which is not the same thing as being single, and a few of my friends needed a book to tell them the difference.
Two men with a system
In The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, a genetics professor in Melbourne called Don Tillman decides to find a wife the way he would run a study: with a questionnaire that filters out everyone unsuitable. Then Rosie turns up, who fails on almost every point. It is very funny, and kinder to Don than he is to himself.
Its closest relative on my shelf is German. In Manfred mi Amor by Gero Wenderholm, a long-term single in Hamburg’s St. Pauli works through a spreadsheet of 186 names with a copy-and-paste opening message, until his personal Cupid, a scruffy creature called Manfred, appears on top of the wardrobe and goes on strike. It is louder and cruder than Simsion, and more honest about the fact that the person swiping is usually the problem. I wrote about the finished book in October. It is German only for now, a sentence I will keep repeating until someone translates it, along with the rest of my list of German dating novels.
Two for the week after a break-up
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams starts as a comedy about a twenty-five-year-old in south London who is on a “break” from her boyfriend and making one bad decision after another. Then it stops being a comedy. It is about family, about mental health and about a group chat of friends who refuse to give up on her. Not a light read, but the one that gets passed on most often.
And because a list like this needs one proper love story, The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary. Tiffy and Leon share a one-bedroom flat and its only bed, in shifts: he works nights, she has the place in the evenings, and for months they only know each other through Post-it notes. I keep it for the end on purpose. It is the book for the moment a friend says she might be ready to try again.
What the pile has in common
Looking at the eight of them stacked on my desk, I notice that hardly any is really about being alone. They are about friends, flatmates, colleagues in a record shop and one Cupid on a wardrobe. That may be the most useful thing to tell someone on Singles’ Day.
I will update this list every November. Which book do you hand to your single friends? Tell me in the comments, I have a friend in London who has now read all eight.
