The Season - by Helen Garner (Hardcover)

About the Book

"From the master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand-new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of being a grandparent. 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" (The 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 Rules 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. Here we find Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, utterly content and unafraid to bask in it-this is a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - A NEW YORKER NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 ∙ A LITHUB FAVORITE BOOK OF 2025
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.

Review Quotes

"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."
--The Paris Review

"[Garner] captures the inexplicable and beautiful myopia of sports fandom, conjuring microuniverses where football occupies every square space. These domains of fandom are, in Garner's prose, rendered in detail almost as small still-life paintings, full of enchantment. . . . She has always refused to fit her ideas neatly into ideology, but she also never turns a blind eye, depicting things not as they should be but as she sees them."
--The Nation

"[Garner's] first stand-alone book in a decade is a surprising and moving account of watching her grandson play Australian-rules football for the U-16 Flemington Colts . . . The book becomes a 'little life-hymn' about boys and sports and feeling alive."
--New Yorker

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

"The Season is Ms. Garner's meditative and moving account of her seven months following the players, who indeed generally ignore her. As an invisible witness, she takes an almost anthropological approach to understanding her youngest grandchild and his peers, boys on the cusp of manhood."
--The Wall Street Journal

"A tender reminiscence, fueled by love, tempered by loss."
--Kirkus Reviews

"[Garner] is working in epic mode in The Season as she examines familiar themes and preoccupations: masculinity and its codes, the pleasures and contradictions of social groups, what it means to bear witness . . . Garner has always been an extraordinary stylist and in The Season her prose, athletic, soars and dances, just like those young footballers."
--The Guardian

About the Author

HELEN GARNER writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I'll Remember This, and How to End a Story, published in the United States as the single-volume How to End a Story.