David Nicholls' latest novel Us, long-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, comes after much anticipation. However, this critically acclaimed writer of young love, made famous by One Day and Starter for Ten, takes his latest work in a different direction.

In Us we meet Douglas: a straight forward, straight thinking scientist whose wife, Connie, has just dramatically announced that she intends to leave him.

So, Douglas vows to make the family’s last holiday together, the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, a holiday none of them will ever forget. It will be a holiday so good that his wife decides to stay with him, and the damaged ground between himself and his son will be magically repaired. Along the way he learns a lot about art, and discovers that a lifetime of saying the wrong things cannot be made up for in a month.

Douglas may be hapless, and at times intensely frustrating, but he is ultimately a loveable character. The narrative follows how thoughts might flow when we are preoccupied; anything he encounters in his travels might send Douglas back into a reverie about his son’s childhood, or when he and his wife met. So the narrative cleverly weaves together strands of different stories, which come together to paint a colourful picture of love and family life.

As well as providing some terrific commentaries (“I found myself sitting between two actors on drugs, a position that, a number of peer reviewed research papers have confirmed, is the worst place a biochemist can be”), Nicholls raises questions about why we fall in love, the nature of marriage, and the irresistible pull of ‘the one that got away’. It also questions perspective, allowing the reader to reflect on how our actions might look to outsiders and indeed how our perceptions of our own actions change with the passage of time.

The characters, even Douglas’ self-righteous son, are compellingly likeable despite their many flaws and you find yourself rooting for this jumbled bunch of lost souls to find their way back together. Overall, a great read that not only lives up to the promise of Nicholls' previous triumphs but offers avid Nicholls fans something they won't have seen before.