For the late 1980s, he resurrects a faultless diorama of the activist female student mentality, in the form of Emma’s cluttered bedroom. With pleasing precision, Nicholls tags cultural touchstones that will be familiar to college graduates on both sides of the Atlantic. The trajectories of Emma’s and Dexter’s lives will resonate with many American readers, even though the couple’s relationship begins at the University of Edinburgh and their adulthood takes root in London.

“One Day” checks in on their intersecting lives once a year, every July 15, from 1988 through 2007. She’s an earnest, outspoken lefty, he a handsome, apolitical toff who “liked the word ‘bourgeois’ and all that it implied” and “wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.” Their chemistry is as inarguable as their differences, but because of the pride, carelessness and misplaced optimism of youth, they let time and distraction separate them. The girl has pined for the boy for years the boy is more aware of the girl than he lets on. In 1988, the day after commencement, two college graduates briefly, romantically collide.

Those of us susceptible to nostalgic reveries of youthful heartache and self-invention (which is to say, all of us) longed to get our hands on Nicholls’s new novel, once our friend revealed its premise: Called “One Day,” it was written by David Nicholls, whom some of us recognized as the author of another novel, “Starter for Ten,” a coming-of-age story about a working-class boy who goes to an elite university, falls in love with a girl who’s out of his league (and not nearly as nice as he is) and enters an intercollegiate quiz contest. Last summer, at a beach house in the Hamptons, a weekend guest arrived carrying a novel she’d picked up abroad and was loath to put down.

One Day by David Nicholls