Literary FictionComedy

Nick Hornby

British · b. 1957

2 books reviewed Avg rating 4.3 / 5Top rating 4.3 / 5

Nick Hornby is a popular English author and screenwriter known for warm, funny, and perceptive fiction and memoir, author of High Fidelity, About a Boy, and Fever Pitch.

Nick Hornby made his name with Fever Pitch (1992), a memoir of football obsession, and became one of Britain’s most beloved popular writers, with a gift for capturing contemporary life, music, and male emotional inarticulacy.

His novels High Fidelity and About a Boy were international bestsellers and successful films, blending humor, pop-culture savvy, and genuine feeling. He has since become a sought-after screenwriter, earning Academy Award nominations for An Education and Brooklyn.

Hornby is admired for his accessible, witty, and humane storytelling, and for taking the textures of ordinary modern life seriously and affectionately.

2 Books Reviewed

BestsellerEditor's Pick

High Fidelity

by Nick Hornby

4.3

Rob Fleming owns Championship Vinyl, a record shop in Holloway, North London. His girlfriend Laura has just left him. He compiles top five lists compulsively — top five break-ups, top five records to play on a Monday morning — and eventually decides to investigate his past relationships to understand what is wrong with him. Hornby's debut novel and the defining book about men who use pop culture to avoid growing up.

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BestsellerEditor's Pick

About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

4.2

Will Freeman is 36, wealthy from his father's royalties, and has constructed a life entirely free of obligation or development. He invents a fictional son, Ned, in order to meet single mothers at SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together). Through this deception he meets Marcus, a twelve-year-old who is relentlessly uncool and whose mother is suicidally depressed. Their unlikely friendship changes both of them.

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Reading Guides & Lists

guide

Where to Start with Nick Hornby: A Reading Guide

Where to start with Nick Hornby — whether to begin with High Fidelity or About a Boy. A complete reading guide to the British comic novelist.

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