The Season: A Fan's Story

Helen Garner is one of the most "prodigiously gifted" writers of our time (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.

The Season finds Garner and her grandson Amby deep in the throes of a mutual obsession with Australian football--or "footy"--as Amby joins his local club team. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition she witnesses on the field: the way Amby hangs his head in shame after a botched kick, or admits he tries to "do cool things" when he knows Garner is watching, hoping it'll wind up in her book.

The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, documenting the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood, as Garner finds herself enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. Here we find Garner living the best years of her life, utterly content and unafraid to bask in it--a bright, generously funny, escapist book from one of our great living writers.