Synopses & Reviews
In America, it is soccer. But in Great Britain, it is the
real football. No pads, no prayers, no prisoners. And that's before the players even take the field.
Nick Hornby (author of High Fidelity and About A Boy) has been a soccer fan since the moment he was conceived. Call it predestiny. Or call it preschool. Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity, Hornby's award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom — its agony and ecstasy, its community, its defining role in thousands of young men's coming-of-age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all, it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.
Review
"This is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest....Fever Pitch is not only the best football book ever written, it's the funniest book of the year." GQ
Review
"Nick Hornby has established himself...as a maestro of the male confessional. [His] books reveal a fascination with the sheer voodoo of what so often passes for masculinity: the weird ritual facts, the useless objects, the losing clubs and teams." The New Yorker
Review
"Comes closer to capturing the truths and absurdities of the obsessed sports fan's mind than anyone else I have read." John Gaustad, Observer
Review
"Funny, wise, and true." Roddy Doyle, author of The Commitments
Review
"A small classic." Michael Palin, author of Hemingway's Chair
Review
"Fever Pitch is a heartfelt and occasionally too self-deprecating attempt to explain how someone becomes a rabid fan of the English soccer club Arsenal. Definitely not for those in search of facts, Pele anecdotes, or soccer history, the book is as much about obsession and a sensitive young man's search for direction and community as it is about goals and penalty kicks. It is also wry and relatively accessible, except for the occasional passage that leaves you longing for a British-American dictionary: 'He appears at first glance to be one of the identikit George Best/ Rodney Marsh/ Stan Bowles long-haired, wayward wasters who were two a new pee 20 years ago.'" Christopher Clarey, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Though Hornby does show flashes of real humor, Fever Pitch features mainly pedestrian insights on life and sport, and then it's on to the next game — the equivalent, for an American reader, of a nil-nil tie." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
NICK HORNBY is a graduate of Cambridge University, and a former teacher. He is the bestselling author of Fever Pitch, High Fidelity, About a Boy, and the editor of the anthology Speaking with the Angel. His latest novel is How To Be Good. High Fidelity was made into a successful film. Hornby was the 1999 winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forester Award. He lives in north London.