‘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
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 dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, 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, Homework is a celebration of opportunities afforded by the post-war settlement.
It captures his time at primary school – discovering the tactile delights of airfix, the combative seasons of conkers, and plagues of verrucas at the local swimming baths. Then, at 11 comes the crux, the exam that decided the future of generations of British school kids: splitting them between Secondary Modern and the transformative possibilities of Grammar school. One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to Grammar school to face the tribulations of teenage sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face) and other misadventures, where he develops a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). At the threshold of university, Dyer gets his first intimations that a short geographical journey – just forty miles up the A40 – might drastically change the trajectory of his life.
The story of an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces roots that extend into the deep foundations of British class and society. Dyer carries us back, with characteristic comic affection, to the deep joys and lingering questions of every childhood, and asks what it means to live through an era of intense transformation.
‘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
“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
‘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
‘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
‘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 wonderfully immersive portrait – observant, funny, touching – of a Sixties childhood and Seventies adolescence in provincial England, as Geoff Dyer takes us deep into a world only barely recognisable now.’ DAVID KYNASTON
‘A jacuzzi of a book: soothing and fizzing at the same time.’ JOAN BAKEWELL
‘With droll wizardry and flashes of tenderness, Dyer conjures the minutiae of his childhood and youth, in the process laying bare an English class system so deeply rooted it constitutes an unconscious. This is memoir meeting the best of social history.’ LISA APPIGNANESI
‘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
Forthcoming from Canongate in the UK in May 2025 and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US in June 2025