Homework: A Memoir
Geoff Dyer
'Geoff Dyer['s] voice is unmistakable' Guardian
'Intellectually playful and Stylistically distinctive' Spectator
'Moving, atmospheric, trutheful, perceptive and hilariously funny' TESSA HADLEY
'Perfect' The Times
Born in 1958, the only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, Geoff Dyer grew up in a world shaped by memories of shortages 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 eleven, comes the crux, the exam that decided the future of generations of British school kids: splitting them between secondary modern and grammar schools. One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to Cheltenham Grammar School to face the tribulations of teenage life - sport, gig-going, romantic fumblings, fights (well, getting punched in the face) - and other misadventures a place 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.
Recalling an eroded but strangely resilient England, Homework traces roots that extend into the deep foundations of class society. dyer carries us back, with characteristic comic affection, to the joys and lingering questions of every childhood, and asks what it means to live through an era of intense transformation.
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About Geoff Dyer
Reviews for Homework: A Memoir
JOHN SELF
The Times
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 While the subject of Homework is ostensibly Geoff Dyer, as ever his interest is really something tangential. Class is "the treacle that gets everywhere in England" . . . Dyer conjures up a Cheltenham of rusty allotment sheds and recycled school dinners
JOHANNA THOMAS-CORR
Sunday Times
A jacuzzi of a book: soothing and fizzing at the same time
JOAN BAKEWELL This acutely observed memoir of postwar England might be the highlight of [Dyer's] illustrious four-decade career . . . This Gloucestershire lad turned boomer Proust is his own man, and he has written a highly original memoir that will provoke, amuse, beguile
and endure
Financial Times
The Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakeable . . . [an] evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms
BLAKE MORRISON
Guardian
Dyer's most personal book yet, this is a moving but characteristically droll account of family, as well as an astute retrospective on post-war Britain
LUKE WARDE
Irish Sunday Independent
Geoff Bloody Dyer - without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.'s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices
Spectator
Dyer is adept at combining an alluring nostalgia with a trenchant understanding of class anxiety and adolescent restlessness, and is very funny to boot
ALEX CLARK
Financial Times
Dyer has produced something exceptional - a work that at one moment reduced me to fits of giggles (with its riffs, say, on school dinners), and at others made me think - about class, memory, or how Britain has changed. If you haven't read Dyer before, Homework is the "perfect place to start"
The Week
Dyer is always interesting
MARGARET DRABBLE 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 Satisfying
Times Literary Supplement
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 A nostalgic snapshot of a post-war coming-of-age
ROGER LEWIS
Daily Telegraph