Homework - by Geoff Dyer (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Originally published in 2025 by Canongate Books Ltd., Great Britain"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Dyer is among the great uncategorizable prose writers of the past several decades . . . If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear--Homework bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state." --Daniel Felsenthal, Los Angeles Times

"Dyer is wonderful on the strangeness of remembering itself . . . Homework records the kinds of memories we all have--first sip of beer, first fight, first sexual encounter--but also the vividly remembered oddities . . . [Dyer] could not yet know that the career his education would make possible meant he would join a branch of British writers running from Thomas Hardy to Zadie Smith, a lineage of outsider autodidacts who revitalized the prim English novel. Dyer's memoir deftly captures this transformation, one both unlikely and inevitable." --Joanna Biggs, The New York Times Book Review

"[Dyer is] a richly versatile writer . . . A captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain . . . Candid and beguiling." --Malcolm Forbes, The Boston Globe

"Funny, forthright and self-revealing . . . A picture of postwar England unlike any other. It may prove unforgettable . . . The memory of childhood to most of us is a burial chamber long sealed off, but Dyer, like a pith-helmeted explorer, has broken into the tomb . . . This Gloucestershire lad [turned] Proust is his own man, and he has written a highly original memoir that will provoke, amuse, beguile--and endure." --Antony Quinn, Financial Times

"Dyer's reminiscences brim with irony and black humor about an era that trumpeted progress, but was suffused with postimperial decline . . . The result is an arresting and evocatively detailed take on family and society." --Publishers Weekly

"Wonderfully wry . . . Dyer's memoir is a glorious consideration of class, family, and the vagaries of childhood." --Booklist

"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

"Reading Homework is like going for a long walk with a close friend, whose singular voice--inventive, absorbing, a little rakish, and wonderfully dry--will hold your interest for hours on end. Geoff Dyer is a profoundly intelligent memoirist. His childhood emerges from these pages as both his utterly distinctive experience and the shared history of a nation." --Merve Emre

"Moving, atmospheric, truthful, perceptive, and hilariously funny--I loved it. A piece of our English history, the story of a vanished time, which feels close at hand but thoroughly gone. What a story. What a great story." --Tessa Hadley

"Has Geoff Dyer set aside his matchless dry wit and sly indirection to finally reveal to us the formation and workings of his inmost heart? No, better, he has employed those gifts in that cause. Homework is funny and beautiful and not homework at all." --Jonathan Lethem

"It's as common as birdsong to hear readers praise Geoff Dyer's versatility. He can write about anything from Lester Young to an aircraft carrier, they sing. Yet many of his readers care little about the subject, as long as Dyer goes on writing in his puckish prose about how the subject has made it impossible for him to write. Now comes Homework, a memoir whose unavoidable subject is, at last, Dyer himself. If he is tempted to lift his ironic mask here, it's only to stumble across more ironies and comic paradoxes in the experience of his growing up. This fuller Dyer proceeds in chronological order, and comes complete with a mum and Dad, an encompassing post-war England, and the strange boyhood wonderment of an only child, but the tone remains pure Geoff. Homework is a stunning feat of retrieval, rendered in such minute detail you would think Dyer had consumed an entire tin of madeleines. Having painted himself into an autobiographical corner, he has produced a masterpiece. Dyer on Dyer--his best conundrum so far." --Billy Collins

"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

"Homework is a beautiful book--wise, hilarious, wide-eyed. Geoff Dyer goes in search of lost time and finds it with the fresh particularity that is his genius. This is a memoir of one man's early days, but it's also a stunning demonstration of how memory and style merge to make lasting art." --Sam Lipsyte

"Dyer is as beguiling and brutally honest as ever. For grown up 'only' children everywhere . . . You can almost smell the baked beans and the Airfix glue." --Ian McShane

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including The Last Days of Roger Federer, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). Dyer is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.