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Summary
Summary
Now a Hulu TV series starring Zoë Kravitz!
"I've always loved Nick Hornby, and the way he writes characters and the way he thinks. It's funny and heartbreaking all at the same time."--Zoë Kravitz
From the bestselling author of About a Boy, A Long Way Down and Dickens and Prince, a wise and hilarious novel about love, heartbreak, and rock and roll.
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? Rob seeks refuge in the company of the offbeat clerks at his store, who endlessly review their top five films; top five Elvis Costello songs; top five episodes of Cheers .
Rob tries dating a singer, but maybe it's just that he's always wanted to sleep with someone who has a record contract. Then he sees Laura again. And Rob begins to think that life with kids, marriage, barbecues, and soft rock CDs might not be so bad.
Author Notes
Nick Hornby was born in Redhill, Surrey, England on April 17, 1957. He graduated from Cambridge University where he studied English. His books High Fidelity; Fever Pitch, which won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award in 1992; About a Boy and An Education were all made into movies. His other books include Slam; A Long Way Down; How to Be Good; Songbook; Shakespeare Wrote for Money; and The Polysyllabic Spree. He has received numerous awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award in 1999 and the Orange Word International Writers' London Award in 2003. In addition to his books, his works have appeared in Esquire, Elle, GQ, Time, and Cosmopolitan. In 2015 his title, Funny Girl made The New York Times Bestseller List.
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Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British journalist Hornby has fashioned a disarming, rueful and sometimes quite funny first novel that is not quite as hip as it wishes to be. The book dramatizes the romantic struggle of Rob Fleming, owner of a vintage record store in London. After his girlfriend, Laura, leaves him for another man, he realizes that he pines not for sexual ecstasy (epitomized by a ``bonkus mirabilis'' in his past) but for the monogamy this cynic has come to think of as a crime. He takes comfort in the company of the clerks at the store, whose bantering compilations of top-five lists (e.g., top five Elvis Costello songs; top-five films) typify the novel's ingratiating saturation in pop culture. Sometimes this can pall: readers may find that Rob's ruminations about listening to the Smiths and the Lemonheadspop music helps him fall in love, he tells usare more interesting than his list of five favorite episodes of Cheers. Rob takes comfort as well in the company of a touring singer, Marie La Salle, who is unpretentious and ``pretty in that nearly cross-eyed American way''but life becomes more complicated when he encounters Laura again. Hornby has earned his own place on the London bestseller lists, and this on-the-edge tale of musical addiction just may climb the charts here. First serial to Esquire. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Journalist Hornby's very funny first novel has already hit the best-seller lists in London and with good reason. In a candid, engaging narrative voice, 35-year-old pop-music fanatic Rob, the owner of a vintage record shop who has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend, attempts to ease his misery by giving an account of his top-five most memorable split-ups. He also consoles himself by coming up with a new filing system for his vast record collection (arranging them according to the order in which he bought them) and by engaging, with his two Wayne and Garth^-like employees, in endless rounds of list making, including best music to play at a funeral ("Many Rivers to Cross," Jimmy Cliff . . . ), top-five dream jobs (producer, Atlantic Records, 1964^-71 . . . ), and five favorite records of all time ("So Tired of Being Alone," Al Green . . . ). Hornby's amazingly accomplished debut should definitely appeal to music fans (and snobs), but it's his literate, painfully honest riffs on romantic humiliation and heartbreak that make the book so special. A rare, touching glimpse of the masculine view of affairs of the heart. --Joanne Wilkinson
Guardian Review
My desert island top five break-ups. Alison Ashworth, Penny Hardwick, zzzzz . . . No room for you in that lot, Laura. Thing is, we're just too old to make each other really miserable. Alison? One day she snogged me, the next she snogged someone else. Penny? She wouldn't let me grope her so I dump her and she knobs Chris Thompson. Etc, etc. You're getting the picture, right? I meet someone, I make some lists, she gets bored and I get dumped. I was 35, running my own nerdy record shop and had already made 19,621 lists by the time we met, Laura, so if you'd wanted to fuck me up you should have got to me earlier. That was then, this is now. Laura leaves first thing on Monday. "I'm not sure I know what I'm doing, Rob," she says. I can tell she knows that I'm thinking that I know what she's thinking so I just go inside and rearrange my record collection so that the covers follow the colours of the spectrum. Barry is already at the shop by the time I arrive. "How was your weekend?" he asks. I think about telling him about Laura but then I think we don't really have that kind of relationship so I reply: "I made a list of all the anagrams you could make out of 'Solomon Burke is God'." "Cool," says Barry. "Did you include 'I'm a sad twat'? Now, how about we see this cool American country and western singer, who once recorded with someone who knew Nanci Griffith, play in the pub later?" I go home to make a list of the top five lists I have ever made and as I walk in the door the phone rings. It's Laura's best friend, Liz. "I'm sorry Laura's left you," she says. "I'm sure it won't work out with her and Ian." This is the first I've heard of a bloke called Ian but I think that Liz doesn't know that I've never heard of him so I decide to tell her that I'm about to go out to a gig. Marie LaSalle opens with a sublime cover version of Boney M's "Brown Girl in the Ring" and I start crying and Marie comes up to me after the gig and we talk for a bit and then I go home and write down her set list. Liz phones again. "You are a complete bastard," she yells, before slamming down the phone. There are two explanations. 1. Laura has told her that I had an affair when she was pregnant and had an abortion. 2. I can't think of another one, but it looks better as a list. I find a letter on the stairs addressed to a Mr I Raymond. The penny drops. Ian is the neighbour I know as Ray. I throw away all my Stevie Ray Vaughan records and go to see Marie play. "Even single girls get horny," she says. "Why don't you come back to my place for a one night stand?" I think about whether she's thinking about whether my dick will be too small or if I will come too quickly but we go back and have some angst and the sex isn't too bad and we both know after we've done it that we won't be doing it again and I tell her that is OK by me even though it isn't really though it sort of is as well. I go home and make a list of all the things a lad-lit book needs. 1. All the blokes are complete losers with dead-end jobs and an emotional inadequacy marginally offset by a self-deprecating, self-awareness. 2. All the women are completely sorted with fantastic jobs and are capable of long-term, mature relationships. 3. That's it. I worry that my inadequacies aren't ineaquate enough so I stalk Laura by calling her 351 times and make jokes that aren't jokes really about whether Ray is any good in bed and then visit my exes to find out why they dumped me and am only a little surprised when they all tell me it was because I am an arse. Those that remember me, that is. I am in the shop not selling any records when Laura calls to tell me that her father has died and wants me to come to his funeral. I make a list of the five most predictable endings to a book and say yes. "You know," says Laura, "when my Dad died, I realised it wasn't Ray that I wanted at the funeral, it was you. We've made so many lists together that I couldn't be bothered to start making new ones. So shag me in the car and we can get back together, have babies and live happily ever after." I'm thinking this sort of bogus catharsis is just about the most unconvincing psychological resolution I've ever come across but I think I won't say so because I can't think how else to wrap things up and besides Hollywood loves simplistic endings so I just say: "I've realised that I couldn't commit to you before because I was worried you might die. Will you marry me?" Laura smiles. "Maybe later, once I've patronised you a bit more," she says. "After all I am still a successful lawyer earning five times as much as you and you are still a useless arse. So why don't I arrange for Marie to play a gig in your sweet little shop and organise a club night for you to DJ." The dancefloor is jumping, the night is going well. Barry takes me to one side. "I can just about accept that you've made all us blokes look like complete dicks," he says. "But what I can't forgive is you paving the way for copycats like that knobber, Tony Parsons." John Crace's Digested Reads appear in G2 on Tuesdays. Caption: article-Dig10.1 I go home to make a list of the top five lists I have ever made and as I walk in the door the phone rings. It's Laura's best friend, Liz. "I'm sorry [Laura]'s left you," she says. "I'm sure it won't work out with her and Ian." This is the first I've heard of a bloke called Ian but I think that Liz doesn't know that I've never heard of him so I decide to tell her that I'm about to go out to a gig. Marie LaSalle opens with a sublime cover version of Boney M's "Brown Girl in the Ring" and I start crying and Marie comes up to me after the gig and we talk for a bit and then I go home and write down her set list. I'm thinking this sort of bogus catharsis is just about the most unconvincing psychological resolution I've ever come across but I think I won't say so because I can't think how else to wrap things up and besides Hollywood loves simplistic endings so I just say: "I've realised that I couldn't commit to you before because I was worried you might die. Will you marry me?" - John Crace.
Kirkus Review
A rollicking first novel from British journalist Hornby that manages to make antic hay of a young (barely) man's hopeless resolve not to come of age. Rob Fleming is the sort of precocious loser whose life has gone so unaccountably wrong that some deep romantic grief must be invoked to explain it. ``The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking,'' according to Rob, ``are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.'' As a case in point, the 35-year-old Rob not only listens to these songs himself but peddles themas the founder and proprietor of Championship Vinyl, a seedy vintage-record store in a quiet back alley of North London. Business is hardly booming these days, and the shop would have gone under long ago but for Rob's lawyer- girlfriend Laura, who has propped it up time and again with cash from her own very ample pool. Once she dumps Rob, however, everything is suddenly on the verge of collapsefiscally and emotionallyand Rob is forced to ask himself how he landed in such a mess. Naturally, he has no idea, so he proceeds to look up his ex-girlfriendsall the way back to high schooland ask them why things never worked out. As a pilgrimage, Rob's quest bears more resemblance to Monty Python than Chaucer, and his own inability to put two and two together somehow endears him to the very women whose affections he seems least able to requite. Reality bludgeons him in the end, and he succeeds, as the plot is spun, in drawing a few morals that surprise him by their simplicity and point toward a happy endingor at least a second chance. Fast, fun, and remarkably deft: a sharp-edged portrait that manages at once to be vicious, generous, and utterly good-natured.
Library Journal Review
Rob Fleming is the kind of person whose mindset is clearly shown by his top two career choices: journalist for the New Musical Express, 1976-79, and producer for Atlantic Records, circa 1964-71. Owner of a small London record shop and musical snob of a high degree, Rob finds his life thrown into turmoil when live-in girlfriend Laura suddenly leaves. He embarks on a journey through the past, tracking down old lovers while finding solace with Marie, an American folk/country singer living in London, even as he yearns for Laura's return. Told in an engaging first-person voice that blends sarcasm with self-deprecating humor, High Fidelity presents a painfully funny take on love, music, and growing up. Already a best seller in Britain, this stunningly assured first novel should be a hit here as well.Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
