In a dreary seaside town in England, Annie loves Duncan or thinks she does, because she always has. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn’t anymore. So Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life.
She sparks an e-mail correspondence with Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanesque singer-songwriter who stopped making music twenty-two years ago, and who is also Duncan’s greatest obsession. A surprising connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they’ve got. Tucker’s been languishing (and he’s unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional, familial, and artistic ruin his young son, Jackson. But then there’s also the material he’s about to release to the world, an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet, titled Juliet, Naked. And he’s just been summoned across the Atlantic with Jackson to face his multitude of ex-wives and children (both just discovered and formerly neglected), in the same country where his intriguing new Internet friend resides.
What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one’s promise.
July 14th, 2009
For 16-year old Sam, life is about to get extremely complicated. He and his girlfriend make that ex-girlfriend Alicia have gotten themselves into a bit of trouble. Sam is suddenly forced to grow up and struggle with the familiar fears and inclinations that haunt us all.
Nick Hornby’s poignant and witty novel shows a rare and impressive understanding of human relationships and what it really means to be a man.
Praise for Slam
“Vintage Hornby.”
People
“Hornby’s witty, gentle genius shines through.”
USA Today
“Offers wry insights into the male psyche, making this book a good bet for Hornby fans, no matter their age.”
Miami Herald
“With Sam, Hornby has given us another of his perfectly imperfect male characters.”
Chicago Sun-Times
September 11th, 2007
Fever Pitch is Hornby’s tribute to a lifelong, obsession soccer. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby’s award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men’s coming of age stories, Fever Pitch is one for the home team.
Praise for Fever Pitch
“Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby’s obsession and the state of the game—The funniest book of the year.”
GQ
“Hornby…comes closer to capturing the truths and absurdities of the obsessed sports fan’s mind than anyone else I have read.”
The Observer
“Fever Pitch is the anatomy of an obsession, a knowing, bittersweet, and very funny autobiography in which the writer’s life is measured not in years but in seasons. I’ve read no better account of what being a fan really means.”
Pete Davies
July 21st, 2006
“All I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.”
— Nick Hornby
Praise for Songbook
“A collection of music-as-metaphor essays—like a diary in mix-tape form.”
Entertainment Weekly
“A joyful meditation on 31 of Hornby’s favorite pop songs—Hornby is excellent at dissecting what makes a song tick, and doing so in an accessible way. [An] embracing, even life-affirming approach to music criticism. Songbook will send readers not only to his favorite songs, but back to their own with fresh ears.”
The Capital Times (Madison)
“The writing isn’t music criticism: Hornby isn’t all that interested in trends in music—He is interested in no, taken by songs.”
The New York Times
“You’d hope that listening to a song 1,500 times would give someone as sharp as Hornby some insights into it, and you’d be right.”
The Oregonian
“Hornby is, as ever, the poet of the annotated list.”
Financial Times
“Strange, but at year’s end, what reminded me of how much I love rock and pop was a book about rock and pop: Nick Hornby’s Songbook—a sort of musical autobiography.”
Dallas Observer
“[A] unique combination of book and sonic compilation.”
Saturday Post
“One of the frustrating things about writing about music is that you’re essentially using one form of communication to talk about another. Writer Nick Hornby has dealt with the problem rather cleverly with his new collection of essays—Each of the 31 essays concerns one of Hornby’s favorite songs, from Bob Dylan’s ‘Can You Crawl Out Your Window?’ to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Heartbreaker’ to Aimee Mann’s ‘I’ve Had It’ to Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘A Minor Incident.’”
Wisconsin State Journal
July 21st, 2006
Compiled by Nick Hornby and featuring brand new stories from some of the most lauded and original voices in the literary world on both sides of the Atlantic, Speaking with the Angel’s proceeds benefit education charities for children with autism.
Praise for Speaking with the Angel
“An exemplary gathering of bright literary lights from both sides of the Atlantic…quirky, colorful, and alive.”
New York Times Book Review
“The book most likely to top the literate hipster’s charts this season.”
Time Out New York
“Kinetic, witty and, most important, soulful in unexpected ways, these stories help us transcend the mundane and look toward the heavens, smiling.”
Newsday
“The most engaging fiction anthology in recent memory.”
Vogue
“An outstandingly good collection—Each story [is] permeated with deadpan wit, modernity, and a unique sense of awfulness.”
The Spectator (London)
”Delicious.”
The Evening Standard (London)
July 21st, 2006
Rob is a pop music junkie who runs his own semi-failing record store. His girlfriend, Laura, has just left him for the guy upstairs, and Rob is both miserable and relieved. After all, could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection?
Praise for High Fidelity
“It is rare that a book so hilarious is also so sharp about sex and manliness, memory and music. Many men and, certainly, all addictive personalities will find in these pages shadows of themselves. And most of us will hear, in Hornby’s acoustic prose, the obsessive chords of the past that more often lock up than liberate our hearts”
The New Yorker
“It is rare that a book so hilarious is also so sharp about sex and manliness, memory and music. Many men and, certainly, all addictive personalities will find in these pages shadows of themselves. And most of us will hear, in Hornby’s acoustic prose, the obsessive chords of the past that more often lock up than liberate our hearts” “As funny, compulsive and contemporary a first novel as you could wish for.”
GQ
“Hornby captures the loneliness and childishness of life with such precision and wit that you’ll find yourself nodding and smiling. High Fidelity fills you with the same sensation you get from hearing a debut record album that has more charm and verve and depth than anything you can recall.”
The New York Times Book Review
“One of the top ten books of the year.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Hornby’s seamless prose and offhand humor make for one hilarious set piece after another, as suffering, self-centered Rob ruminates on women, sex, and Abbey Road. But then he’s forced to consider loneliness, fitting-in, death, and failure and that is what lingers.”
Spin
“Keep this book away from your girlfriend it contains too many of your secrets to let it fall into the wrong hands.”
Details
“Candid, engaging—painfully honest—A rare, touching glimpse of the masculine view of affairs of the heart.”
Booklist
July 21st, 2006
Will Lightman is a Peter Pan for the 1990s. At 36, the terminally hip North Londoner is unmarried, hyper-concerned with his coolness quotient, and blithely living off his father’s novelty-song royalties. What interferes with Will’s career arc, of course, is reality in the shape of a 12-year-old boy.
Praise for About a Boy
“An utterly charming, picaresque tale of an older guy, a young kid, and the funky, dysfunctional real-life ties that bind and unbind.”
Vogue
“Humorous fiction with a real heart—Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once. He combines a skilled, intuitive appreciation for the rigors of comic structure with highly original insights about the way the enchantments of popular culture insinuate themselves into middle-class notions of romance.”
The New York Times Book Review
“A pleasurable book—both subtle and provocative but put together with a skill that makes it seem simpler than it is. It is, in fact, easier to read than it is to forget.”
The Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A follow-up to High Fidelity—About a Boy is an acerbic, emotionally richer yet no less funny tale—shrewdly hilarious.”
Entertainment Weekly
“The conversations between Will and Marcus are hilariously loopy.”
The Boston Globe
“Hornby’s trademark wit, breezy writing and his characters’ wry internal dialogues keep the reader cheerfully flipping pages.”
The Wall Street Journal
“An amusing male-bonding theme—stylish, well-observed.”
People
“Writing with real ‘soul.’”
Harper’s Bazaar
July 21st, 2006
Katie Carr is certainly trying to be good. That’s why she puts up with her husband David, the self-styled “Angriest Man in Holloway.” But one fateful day, she finds herself in a Leeds parking lot, having just slept with another man. What Katie doesn’t yet realize is that her fall from grace is just the first step on a spiritual journey more torturous than the interstate at rush hour.
Praise for How to Be Good
“Hornby is a writer who dares to be witty, intelligent and emotionally generous all at once.”
The New York Times Book Review
“A darkly funny and thought-provoking ride—How to Be Good gleefully distorts what can happen to a relationship when one partner changes and the other must accept it or take a new path. The book examines what it means to be good to oneself, one’s family and the world at large. While this could be sanctimonious fare, Hornby infuses it with wit and a sense of the absurd.”
USA Today
“This is a surprising novel of ideas that balances spiritual, political and familial questions, and it’s an exciting departure for a quietly excellent writer.”
People
“Good gives Hornby a new perch beyond rating records and relationships: the self-depreciating, self-doubting liberal, repelled by lockstep liberalism yet distrustful of the locked-in certitude of the right—Hornby reaches deeper, away from pat, albeit funny, lines, and stakes new literary territory.”
The Boston Globe
“Mr. Hornby’s high-octane mixture of seriousness spiked with humor generates a powerful narrative drive that makes How to Be Good a page-turner.”
Washington Times
“Nick Hornby’s writing is not full of itself, but candidly introspective; not facetious, but hilarious; not unkind and terrible, but their opposites, generous and terrific—How to Be Good will make the happily coupled clutch their sweethearts to their bosoms and the single turn down dates with a shudder.”
Newsday (New York)
“An ambitious example of postmodern literature at its most entertaining.”
The Seattle Times
“The pleasure of Hornby’s amiably dyspeptic fiction lies in his sharp eye for the absurdities of contemporary culture—[He] forces you to think about the tense bourgeois minuet between self-interest and morality, about the difference between applauding and doing good works—The result is a farce that manages to be breezily hilarious and thought-provoking at the same time.”
New York
July 21st, 2006
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year’s Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper’s House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives.
Praise for A Long Way Down
“STARTLING—WILDLY ENJOYABLE—A Long Way Down is a daring high-wire act, and Hornby pulls it off perfectly.”
The Seattle Times
“At its heart, A Long Way Down isn’t really about suicide itself anyway. It’s more about what happens when you don’t kill yourself, and the tale Hornby subsequently tells is an unusual and unpredictable one.”
The New York Times
“It’s like The Breakfast Club rewritten by Beckett—What makes the book work is Hornby’s refusal to give an inch to sentimentality or cheap inspirational guff.”
Time
“Hornby is a writer of great feeling and warmth—A Long Way Down is high on charm and frequently hilarious.”
Washington Post
“A mordant, brilliant novel— A Long Way Down ought to be required reading for writing students who want to know how to evoke one set of circumstances with its opposite, how to capture unspeakable pain with humor, how to suggest camaraderie with trenchant, piss-all irony, how to turn a novel based on suicide into a cello suite about how to go on living.”
The Boston Globe
“If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than a little in common with Hornby’s grimly comic, oddly moving novel. It’s a thrill to watch a writer as talented as Hornby take on the grimmest of subjects without flinching, and somehow make it funny and surprising at the same time. This is a brave and absorbing book.”
Tom Perrotta, Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The verdict: Hornby’s still the only writer doing what he does—while unapologetically embracing the language and ethos of pop culture, he boldly endeavors to make meaning of life’s most existential questions.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“In typical Hornby fashion, the book mixes endearing but flawed characters with hilarious yet heartfelt dilemmas—Hornby’s unique voice consistently echoes to universal acclaim, generating a fandom that rivals that of another London great, Charles Dickens.”
GQ
July 21st, 2006
Jenny is a 16-year-old girl stifled by the tedium of adolescence; she can’t wait for her sophisticated adult life to begin. One rainy day her suburban existence is upended by the arrival of David, a much older suitor who introduces her to a glittering new world of concerts, art, smoky bars, urban nightlife, and his glamorous friends, replacing her traditional education with his own version. It could be her awakening or her undoing.
This edition of Hornby’s adapted screenplay, which includes stills from the film, is a perfect accompaniment to the highly anticipated movie, which stars Carey Mulligan as Jenny, Peter Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson, Dominic Cooper, and Alfred Molina. It is a must-have for fans of Hornby’s novels, featuring his signature pitch perfect dialogue, mordant wit, and the resonant humanity of his writing.
July 20th, 2006
Juliet, Naked
Slam
A Long Way Down
How to Be Good
About a Boy
High Fidelity
Speaking with the Angel
Songbook
Fever Pitch
An Education