He doesn’t sell his reader short, for this love affair is like nothing we have encountered before in his fiction. Hornby’s latest novel, Just Like You” sees him dispensing with other topics and focusing entirely on the relationship between his two lead characters and its impact on those around them. It may not have fire in its belly, but it has great warmth in its heart. But why should there be? It is frequently funny, consistently engaging and it’s not primarily a sociological treatise or a satire: it’s a love story. I don’t think there’s much in here to challenge or discomfit.

Just Like You – as a comedy of class difference and of the soft racism of bien-pensant liberals – invites comparison with Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age and seems to me to lack some of that novel’s sharpness. Does he tell us much that we don’t already know or think we don’t already know? On this I’m not sure. Hornby is surefooted around all these issues, amiable and forgiving. By setting most of Just Like You in 2016, what’s more, Hornby stirs in that great exposer of fissures in class, race and generation: the Brexit referendum. And, what’s more, he makes a social comedy of the two of them falling in love, one that gently dramatises their differences of class, race and generation. In this age of anxiety about cultural appropriation and suchlike, kudos to Nick Hornby’s bold move in Just Like You, He narrates one half of it from the point of view of a working-class black man in his early 20s and the other half from the point of view of a 42-year-old middle-class white mother.

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