The Season

A Fan's Story

De: Helen Garner

Narrado por: Helen Garner

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE

From the beloved master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of family life.

"Inclusive and universal, curious and tender, perceptive and wise."—The New York Times

Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (The New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence.

Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.

The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. The Season finds Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, surprised to discover their riches—a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers.

©2025 Helen Garner (P)2025 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"This is a book about a sport you probably haven’t seen and in which you almost certainly have no interest, written by someone who doesn’t know much about it. And it’s beautiful."—The New York Times

“The low-key doyenne of Australian letters . . . writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness. . . . Garner bears witness in a mode that is mischievous but sincere, fresh but almost wholly free of snark, illuminated by a roving interest in the random, illustrative, unsettling, and profound.”—Lora Kelley, The Paris Review

"I understand zip about football or any sport, but I cried. Glorious."—Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional