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Nick Hornby

(b.1957)

Nick Hornby was born in 1957. His father, Sir Derek Hornby, was a successful businessman. Hornby junior went to Maidenhead Grammar School then studied English at Cambridge. After teaching in Cambridge, he worked for the Korean electronics giant Samsung as a meeter and greeter for their executives in the UK.

After that, he worked as a teacher then as a freelance journalist and then became a novelist. His career really took off with the phenomenally successful Fever Pitch in 1992 and he hasn't looked back since. How to be Good made the 2001 Booker long-list.

Genres: Literary Fiction

Series

Stuff I've Been Reading
   1. Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree (2004)
   2. Housekeeping vs. Dirt (2006)
   3. Shakespeare Wrote for Money (2008)
   4. More Baths, Less Talking (2012)
   Stuff I've Been Reading (2013)

Novels

   High Fidelity (1995)
   About a Boy (1998)
   How to Be Good (2001)
   A Long Way Down (2005)
   Click (2007) (with others)
   Slam (2007)
   Juliet, Naked (2009)
   Funny Girl (2014)
   Just Like You (2019)

Collections

   Big Night Out (2002) (with others)
   Otherwise Pandemonium (2005)
   Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things . . . (2005) (with others)
   Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium (2009)

Anthologies edited

Speaking with the Angel (2000)
The United States of McSweeney's (2009) (with Eli Horowitz)

Series contributed to

Open Door Series 5
Not a Star (2006)

Plays show

Non fiction show

Omnibus editions show

Books containing stories by Nick Hornby

Dear NHS (2020)
100 Stories to Say Thank You
edited by
Adam Kay

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 (2013)
(Best American Nonrequired Reading)
edited by
Dave Eggers

Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me (2008)
edited by
Ben Karlin

More books

Award nominations

	2005 Whitbread Prize for Best Novel (nominee) : A Long Way Down
	2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (nominee) : A Long Way Down
	2001 Booker Prize (longlist) : How to Be Good

Nick Hornby recommends

Liars (2024)
Sarah Manguso
"A white-hot dissection of the power imbalances in a marriage, and as gripping as you want fiction to be. Any spouse that has ever argued about money, time, work and childcare should read it."

Welcome to Glorious Tuga (2024)
(Tuga Trilogy, book 1)
Francesca Segal
"Welcome to Glorious Tuga is a gorgeous book, an extraordinary cross between the work of Gerald Durrell and Jane Austen. It is full of characters that you haven't met in fiction before, living their lives in a forgotten corner of the globe in which everything, right down to the fruit, has been brilliantly and thoroughly imagined. I didn't want to go home."

Everything's Fine (2023)
Cecilia Rabess
"A subtle, ironic, wise state-of-the-nation novel, sharp enough to draw blood, hidden inside a moving, intimate, sincere and very real love story - or vice versa."

Pineapple Street (2023)
Jenny Jackson
"Jenny Jackson has written a lovely, absorbing, acutely observed novel about class, money and love. These are the themes of Henry James and Jane Austen, but they are observed with a fresh eye and a contemporary voice. Who wouldn't want to read Pineapple Street?"

Cult Classic (2022)
Sloane Crosley
"Cult Classic is aimed with deadly accuracy at those unfortunate enough to have dated only during the twenty-first century. It's witty - of course, because Sloane Crosley wrote it - and razor sharp, and very clever, ditto, but it's more romantic and redemptive than one had any right to expect. It also contains one-liners destined to appear on T-shirts and coffee mugs. It's so good. I couldn't stop reading it."

Trespasses (2022)
Louise Kennedy
"Trespasses is a beautiful, devastating novel. It feels real and true, and it loves its characters, utterly authentic people trying to live ordinary lives in desperate times. This book will last."

Mary Jane (2021)
Jessica Anya Blau
"I LOVED this novel...If you have ever sung along to a hit on the radio, in any decade, than you will devour Mary Jane at 45rpm."

The Souvenir Museum (2021)
Elizabeth McCracken
"Elizabeth McCracken is one of my favorite writers. . . . She writes with acuity, soul, and a kind of easy grace that probably kills her, about characters she has created to love. . . . Anything new by her is an excuse for wild, drunken celebration."

We Run the Tides (2021)
Vendela Vida
"We Run the Tides is smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it’s also FUNNY. Who knew that you could combine all of those qualities into one slim volume? Not many writers, that’s for sure. I loved every single page, and was sorry when I had to say goodbye to Eulabee and her family."

You Would Have Told Me Not To (2020)
Christopher Coake
"Sometimes when you're reading these stories, you forget to breathe... They're beautifully written, and they have a bottom, but they're never dull and they all contain striking and dramatic narrative ideas."

Golden Hill (2016)
Francis Spufford
"Francis Spufford has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature."

Half a Life (2010)
Darin Strauss
"Precise, elegantly written, fresh, wise, and very sad."

The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009)
Jess Walter
"It made me laugh more than any other book this year."

Butterfly (2009)
Sonya Hartnett
"A dreamy, lyrical novel. Exquisitely written and unforgettable."

One Day (2008)
David Nicholls
"Big, absorbing, smart, fantastically readable . . . brilliant on the details of the last couple of decades of British cultural and political life . . . the perfect beach read for people who are normally repelled by the very idea of beach reads."

Sharp Teeth (2007)
Toby Barlow
"As ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it's about identity, community, love, death, and all the things we want our books to be about."

Then We Came to the End (2007)
Joshua Ferris
"Terrific . . . The rhythms and substance of a working day slowly revealed to have the rhythms and substance of life itself."

What is the What (2006)
Dave Eggers
"One of the best writers around."

Havoc (2004)
Ronan Bennett
"With Greene gone, and Richard Ford last spotted in suburbia, we need writers like Ronan Bennett."

How to Breathe Underwater (2003)
Julie Orringer
"Outstanding."

The Used Women's Book Club (2003)
Paul Bryers
"Bryers may be the best of his type."

Feed (2002)
M T Anderson
"Another book that can be added to the list entitled 'YA Novels I'd Never Heard of But Which Turn Out to Be Modern Classics' and Feed may well be the best of the lot... Funny, serious, sad, superbly realized."

The Speckled People (2000)
Hugo Hamilton
"A wonderful book... thoughtful and compelling, smart and original, beautifully written."

Preston Falls (1998)
David Gates
"Preston Falls is dark and funny, bleak and brilliant...In other words, David Gates makes me sick with envy."

The Speed Queen (1997)
Stewart O'Nan
"A terrific novel, gripping, quirky, funny, violent and heartbreaking. I haven't read a better book so far this year."

Bridget Jones's Diary (1996)
(Bridget Jones, book 1)
Helen Fielding
"Helen Fielding is one of the funniest writers in Britain and Bridget Jones is a creation of comic genius."

The Beach (1996)
Alex Garland
"THE BEACH is fresh, fast-paced, compulsive and clever - a LORD OF THE FLIES for the Generation X. It has all the makings of a cult classic."

Going Down (1996)
Jennifer Belle
"Witty, gritty and thoroughly convincing."

Pompey (1993)
Jonathan Meades
"The product of a brilliant mind"

Girls High (1990)
Barbara Anderson
"Barbara Anderson is a born writer."

Room Temperature (1990)
Nicholson Baker
"Short, and funny, and bright as a button."

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