I really enjoyed this, maybe because there were portions of it that were painfully familiar.

Oh, awkward relationships, why must you be so entertaining to me?

A couple in their mid-thirties, Duncan and Annie, are drifting apart – largely because Duncan is obsessed with the music of Tucker Crowe, an obscure singer-songwriter who produced one brilliant album in the mid-Eighties and then disappeared.

“The initial spur for the book was seeing this article in Vanity Fair about Sly Stone [another famously reclusive rocker]. But that also fed into some other stuff I’d been thinking about – mainly about how the internet has allowed people like Duncan to spend all day talking to one another.”

Once again – as he did in High Fidelity – Hornby is writing about musical obsessives. In Juliet, Naked, though, the tone is darker and less forgiving than before. The fascination with obsession is as keen as ever, but here it comes mixed with an awareness of how easily it can turn people into colossal blinkered bores.

(from telegraph.co.uk)

Hornby will be at the Skirball Cultural Center October 6.