Juliet, Naked

Annie and Duncan fit together naturally, like jigsaw pieces, though Duncan's passionate obsession with Tucker Crowe, the reclusive, tortured-genius songwriter, has never left much time for anything more meaningful - marriage, kids, conversation about something other than Tucker Crowe and his disappearance after a mysterious incident in a nightclub toilet twenty years previously. In fact, she's starting to wonder whether she's wasted fifteen years on a bad relationship, stuck in a dull job in a dull town on England's bleak east coast.

When Tucker's record company suddenly issue a stripped-down version of his most famous album, Tucker's first release for decades, and Annie just can't see what's good about it, or at least what's better about it than the original, Duncan finds solace in bed with somebody else - and Annie is at last liberated to throw him out.

But worse is to follow for Duncan: it turns out that Annie is not alone in her opinion. After she posts a review on a fan website, she gets a response from a completely unlikely source. The correspondence which follows is doubly satisfying: it turns out that not only is Tucker an expert like her on years of wasted life, but she begins to realize what lies behind his long silence, something that Duncan would never be able to appreciate. And it certainly isn't an incident in a nightclub toilet...

Nick Hornby's compelling new novel, four years after A Long Way Down, is about the nature of creativity and obsession, and how two lonely people can gradually find each other.