When you're 36, going on 18, life is about being hip, being cool, and embracing all that Mothercare has to offer ...
Will is thirty-six but acts like a teenager. He reads the right magazines, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also discovered a great way to score with women - at single parents' groups, full of available (and grateful) mothers, all waiting for Mr Nice Guy. That's where he meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old in the world. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart, he looks after his Mum and he's never even owned a pair of trainers. Perhaps if Will can teach Marcus how to be a kid, Marcus can help Will grow up - and they can both start to act their age ...
'Such a good book'
Daily Telegraph
'A delightful, observant, funny and good-hearted novel'
Terence Blacker, Mail on Sunday
'About the awful, hilarious, embarrassing places where children and adults meet, and Hornby has captured it with delightful precision'
Irish Times
'It takes a writer with real talent to make this work, and Hornby has it - in buckets'
Literary Review
'A very entertaining and endearing read'
The Times
'A stunner of a novel. Utterly read-in-one-day, forget-where-you-are-on-the-tube gripping'
Marie Claire
'It is absolutely unthinkable that you will be able to finish even the first chapter without seeing a little bit of yourself and everyone you know in both Will and his newly "adopted" progeny Marcus'
Irish Independent
'Hornby’s sharp observations and his quirky comedic instincts ensure that our journey is entertaining, funny - and occasionally affecting'
New York Times
'The portrait of Marcus’s claustrophobic home life, his troubles at school and general bewilderment at the behaviour of adults, is written with great skill. Indeed with a sympathetic genius that more self-conscious writers will envy'
Daily Mail
'A logical extension of Hornby’s territory, combining the humour and keen perception of his earlier books with a harsher set of facts; a north London landscape slightly reminiscent of Joseph Connolly and Martin Amis. The psychology of Hornby’s characters is carefully, thoughtfully and gently done. There is a heart to Hornby’s writing which sets its world apart from those of Connolly or Amis'
Tobias Hill, Observer |
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Buy About A Boy
Interview |
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Badly Drawn Boy's soundtrack
http://www.xlrecordings.com/badlydrawnboy/release/~aboutaboysoundtr-1/
UIP site
http://www.uip.co.uk/films/about_a_boy/ |
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