Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
The first memoir from Geoff Dyer, author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, recollecting his childhood and coming of age in postwar Britain
‘Geoff Dyer[‘s] voice is unmistakable’ Guardian
‘Intellectually playful and Stylistically distinctive’ Spectator
‘Moving, atmospheric, trutheful, perceptive and hilariously funny’ TESSA HADLEY
‘Perfect’ The Times
Born in 1958, the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of shortages and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, Homework is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the post-war settlement.
It captures his time at primary school - discovering the tactile delights of Airfix, the combative seasons of conkers and plagues of verrucas at the local swimming baths. Then, at eleven, comes the crux, the exam that decided the future of generations of British school kids: splitting them between secondary modern and grammar schools. One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to Cheltenham Grammar School to face the tribulations of teenage life - sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face) - and other misadventures a place where he develops a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). At the threshold of university, Dyer gets his first intimations that a short geographical journey - just forty miles up the A40 - might drastically change the trajectory of his life.
Recalling an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces roots that extend into the deep foundations of class society. dyer carries us back, with characteristic comic affection, to the joys and lingering questions of every childhood, and asks what it means to live through an era of intense transformation.
“If you’ve read Dyer before then you’ll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven’t, it’s the perfect place to start”
John Self
the Times
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“Geoff Dyer and I nearly share a name and a birth year. We were born in different countries, however, under different circumstances. No matter. Every page of this exquisite, witty memoir brought back a flood of memories and emotions that seemed to be my own, so lovingly and precisely does Dyer articulate them. A heartfelt book by a supremely intelligent writer”
Jeffrey Eugenides
“While the subject of Homework is ostensibly Geoff Dyer, as ever his interest is really something tangential. Class is “the treacle that gets everywhere in England” … Dyer conjures up a Cheltenham of rusty allotment sheds and recycled school dinners”
Johanna Thomas-corr
sunday Times
“This acutely observed memoir of postwar England might be the highlight of [Dyer’s] illustrious four-decade career … This Gloucestershire lad turned boomer Proust is his own man, and he has written a highly original memoir that will provoke, amuse, beguile – and endure”
financial Times
“The Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakeable … [an] evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms”
Blake Morrison
guardian
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is an award-winning author of four novels and numerous non-fiction books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona and, most recently, The Last Days of Roger Federer. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, he has recently returned to London after ten years as Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His books have been translated into twenty-six languages.
geoffdyer.com
“I don’t go to books for comfort; I have a memory foam pillow for that”
With his memoir Homework out now, Geoff Dyer talked to the Guardian about books: from the book he’s reread more than any other, to the book he is currently reading.
Guardian