The Season
A Fan's Story
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A NEW YORKER NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 ∙ A LITHUB FAVORITE BOOK OF 2025
From the beloved master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of family life.
"Inclusive and universal, curious and tender, perceptive and wise."—The New York Times
Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (The New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence.
Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.
The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. The Season finds Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, surprised to discover their riches—a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers.
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Garner (Everywhere I Look) reflects on masculinity and the passage of time in this tender if somewhat opaque chronicle of the season she spent watching her grandson play Australian football. Feeling adrift in her writing, Garner asked her 15-year-old grandson Amby if she could accompany him to his practices. Amby had been playing "footy" since he was a "tubby little eight-year-old" but had since grown into a six-foot tall, broad-shouldered young man. "All my life I've fought men, lived under their regimes," Garner writes, but the experience of becoming a grandmother to boys helped her "see their delicacy, their fragility." With a notebook in hand, Garner hovers at a distance from the on-field action, capturing Amby's physical prowess with wonder even as the "nana" in her struggles to tamp down her fear of injury. She tinges the memoir with a hint of sadness, aware, at 80, that as her grandchildren blossom, time is exerting the opposite effect on her. Interspersed throughout are accounts of Garner watching Australian football on TV, which lack the emotional heft of the other chapters. Furthermore, American readers unfamiliar with the sport are left to tread water. It adds up to a moving but uneven reading experience.
