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Nick Hornby is the author ot the novels High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to Be Good, and A Long Way Down, and the memoir Fever Pitch, He is also the author of Songbook, a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award, and The Polysyllabic Spree, and editor of the short story collection Speaking with the Angel. The recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and the Orange Wird International Writers London Award 2003, he lives in North London, Visit his website at www.nickhornby.net.
Praise for Fever Pitch An International Bestseller
Hornby has established himself ... as a maestro of the male confessional. [His] books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity: the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams.The New Yorker
Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornbys obsession and the state of the game. Fever Pitch is not only the best football book ever written, its the funniest book of the year. GQ
Hornby... comes closer to capturing the truths and absurdities of the obsessed sports fans mind than anyone else I have read.
The Observer
Utterly hilarious. Elle
Fever Pitch transcends the mundane and the sporty to say something about the way we live.Time Out
Praise for A Long Way Down
A New York Times Bestseller
Sparkling...That comic set piecefour people wind up on top of a building with the same mission but get distracted by a quarrel over who has the best reason to end it allis a brilliant opening to another irresistible comic novel by the author of About a Boy.... Hornbys humor is so cutting that you can cuddle up with his (ultimately) warm view of humanity and not hate yourself in the morning.People (four stars)
If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the results might have had more than a little in common with Hornbys grimly comic, oddly moving novel. Its 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, PublishersWeekly (starred review)
One New Years Eve, four people with very different reasons but a common purpose, find their way to the top of a fifteen-story building in London. None of them has calculated that, on a date humans favor for acts of significance, in a place known as a local suicide-jumpers favorite, they might encounter company. A Long Way Down is the story of what happens next, and of what doesnt.... At its heart, [it] isnt really about suicide itself, anyway.... Its more about what happens when you dont kill yourself, and the tale Hornby subsequently tells is an unusual and unpredictable one.... [He] resists melodramatic resolutions or glorious moments of redemption, and he doesnt smuggle away or refute all the reasons his characters took with them to the rooftop where they met, the ones that urged them toward the edge rather than down to the ground the slow way, back into the world.The New York Times Book Review
Its like The Breakfast Club rewritten by Beckett.... What makes the book work is Hornbys 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.The 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 Sunday Globe
Praise forAbouta Boy
A New York Times Bestseller
Mr. Hornbys wonderful antic sense of humor is employed here.... [His] sharp observations and his quirky comedic instincts ensure that our journey... is entertaining, funnyand occasionally affecting.
The New York Times
With any luck, well soon be having lots of fab and funny writers emulating Nick Hornby, and his kind of accomplishment wont seem quite so foreign.
TheNew York Times Book Review
Acerbic, hip wit.Elle
Hornby is a fine writer, swift and pointed, with a lighter, more mischievous heart than he lets on, and more sympathy for the devil than he admits to.
New York magazine
You should read [About a Boy] for its depictions of the trials of motherhood, the drawbacks to self-imposed detachment, the ache of childhood need, the elastic confines of what constitutes a family, and how it may never be too late to grow up.The Washington Post
Hornbys About a Boy is that rare thinga second novel that is better, richer, and more rounded than its authors successful debut.The Weekly Standard
Hispoint,lads, is that theres more to life than shagging!
Newsweek
No one- or two-hit wonder, Hornby once again shows his deftness at plucking the heartstrings of lost, frozen souls in 90s London.Paper
About a Boy is the sort of writing you laugh over even when you read it for the second timeand its well worth that second read.... Fresh and original... What does Hornby give the man who has everything? A life.The Hamilton Spectator(Ontario)
Praise for High Fidelity
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the top ten books of the year.Entertainment Weekly
It is rare that a book so hilarious is also so sharp about sex and manliness, memory and music. Many menand certainly, all addictive personalitieswill find these pages shadows of themselves. And most of us will hear, in Hornbys acoustic prose, the obsessive chords of the past that more often lock up than liberate our hearts. The New Yorker
As funny, compulsive, and contemporary a first novel as you could wish for. GQ
Mr. Hornby captures the loneliness and childishness of adult life with such precision and wit that youll 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
A true original ... Hornby is as fine an analyst as he is a funny man.
Time
Hornbys 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 hes forced to consider loneliness, fitting-in, death, and failureand that is what lingers.Spin
