Nick Hornby

He keeps a list, in fact. But Laura isn't on it - even though she's just become his latest ex. He's got his life back, you see. He can just do what he wants when he wants: like listen to whatever music he likes, look up the girls that are on his list, and generally behave as if Laura never mattered. But Rob finds he can't move on. He's stuck in a really deep groove - and it's called Laura. Soon, he's asking himself some big questions: about love,...

'How cool was Will Freeman?' Too cool! At thirty-six, he's as hip as a teenager. He's single, child-free, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also found a great way to score with women: attend single parents' groups full of available (and grateful) mothers, all hoping to meet a Nice Guy. Which is how Will meets Marcus, the oldest twelve-year-old on the planet. Marcus is a bit strange: he listens to Joni Mitchell and Mozart,...

Here, Nick Hornby writes about 31 songs - most of them loved, some of them once loved, all of them significant to him - encompassing singers as varied as Van Morrison and Nelly Furtado, and songs as different as Bruce Springsteen's 'Thunder Road' and a reggae rendition of 'Puff the Magic Dragon'.

'Read what you enjoy, not what bores you', Nick Hornby tells us. And in this new collection of his columns from the 'Believer' magazine, he shows us how it's done. Or at least, how he does it: whether plunging into a biography of Dickens whilst his children are destroying something in the room next door or devouring a whole series of children's books whilst on holiday. Hornby is the intelligent, committed but sceptical reader we'd all like to be.