Just when it seemed the geeky-kid-goes-to-college story had been told in every possible way, along comes David Nicholls with "A Question of Attraction." It's a fresh and very funny novel about a 19-year-old working-class Brit who takes his Kate Bush albums, his acne and his wit to college in 1985.

Fire up your Smiths and Kate Bush CDs and settle in with a copy of this book.

Nicholls, who has written teleplays for Bravo's "Cold Feet" and "I Saw You" and the BBC's "Rescue Me," which he also created, has a talent for droll dialogue and a wonderful sense of the ridiculous. He marries the agony of adolescence with ironic humor, producing a union of subtlety and slapstick that's not to be missed.

Nicholls' debut novel, a best seller in Britain, follows Brian Jackson through freshman year. Brian is bright. He has the slipshod, eclectic intelligence of youth and a very good memory for random facts.

Life takes a turn for the better when he's given a chance to try out for his favorite TV quiz show, "University Challenge." He helps the beautiful Alice Harbinson cheat her way onto the university team, and he ends up an alternate. He's determined to woo Alice and wow the quiz-show audience. But it's a long year.

And at one point, Brian worries that he might be an alcoholic. He tries to reconcile his real life in the 1980s with his fantasy life:

"In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and funny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or Abe North in 'Tender Is the Night,' and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager, and because I'm too much of a prat to know when to stop. After all, it's not as if I can blame it on the Falklands."

In a male version of "Bridget Jones's Diary," Brian also ruminates on the minefield of social conversation:

"Ideally, of course, I'd like to wake up in the morning and be handed a transcript of everything I'm about to say during the day, so that I could go through it and rewrite my dialogue, cutting the fatuous remarks and the crass, idiotic jokes. But clearly that's not practical, and the other option, of never speaking again, isn't going to work either."