Homework
A Memoir
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a most anticipated book of 2025 by Vulture | The Guardian | Financial Times | The Observer | The Times (London) | Literary Hub
"A picture of postwar England unlike any other . . . A highly original memoir that will provoke, amuse, beguile—and endure." —Antony Quinn, Financial Times
"Homework is wonderful Geoff-Dyer writing, which we've all learned to crave; something to delight and to move us and to edify us on every page. I find him an irresistible writer." —Richard Ford
A portrait of a young boy, who keeps passing exams—and of a changing England in the 1960s and 1970s.
The only child of a sheet-metal worker and a dinner lady who worked at the canteen of the local school, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of the Depression and the Second World War. But far from being a story of hardship overcome, this loving memoir is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement, of which the author was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that decided the future of generations of British schoolkids: secondary modern or the transformative possibilities of grammar school? One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to grammar school, where he develops a love of literature (and beer and prog rock).
Mapping a path from primary school through the tribulations of teenage sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face), and other misadventures with comic affection, Homework takes us to the threshold of university, where Dyer gets the first intimations that a short geographical journey—just forty miles—might extend to the length of a life.
Recalling an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces, in perfectly phrased and hilarious detail, roots that extend into the deep foundations of class society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this raucous coming-of-age memoir, novelist and journalist Dyer (The Last Days of Roger Federer) recalls growing up in the 1960s and '70s in the English town of Cheltenham. Dyer's industrious parents shared in Britain's new working-class prosperity by buying the previously unimaginable luxuries of a house and car. Meanwhile, Dyer's academic chops catapulted him into a toney grammar school, then to Oxford. Much of the book is a deep dive into the period's boy culture and its obsessions with trading bubblegum cards and building models of WWII warplanes. Along the way, Dyer's rich portraits of his parents reveal how they were at odds with the new Britain: his mother's disfiguring birthmarks made her feel inferior to her newly glamorous surroundings, and his father was a tightwad, suspicious of consumerism but endlessly trustful of government authority. Dyer's reminiscences brim with irony and black humor about an era that trumpeted progress, but was suffused with postimperial decline—in the family garden, Dyer's father "aimed to grow all the carrots, peas, potatoes and other vegetables that we would need to live on in the event of a catastrophic collapse." The result is an arresting and evocatively detailed take on family and society. Photos.
