On the strength of his latest book, About a Boy, I went out and bought Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. When there are four pages of raving reviews the beginning of the novel, when the back cover blurb is so gushing as to hype up the book to Phantom Menace levels... you have to wonder whether it's going to deliver or not.
High Fidelity hardly disappoints.
Far funnier than About a Boy, and regarded by many (okay, myself and all my friends who've read both) as his best work to date, High Fidelity takes the male Bridget Jones, runs with it, and then surpasses Bridget and her insecure hangups.
Rob is (nearly) every guy. The problem with Rob is that he's ever so slightly obsessed with his music collection, but owning a shope called Championship Vinyl that specialises in, well, specialist collections, should really serve as a pointer. Predictably (but, I must point, enjoyably), the backdrop of High Fidelity is Rob's move from newly single insecure music anorak (in as nice a way as possible) to no-longer single and happy, with a whole life to look forward to.
His journey isn't so much fraught with difficulties as it is fraught with American divas, meddlesome friends and the occasional dead ex-girlfriend's father. Things could hardly get much better, but you'd be shamelessly relieved that in the end, they do.
You'll laugh, you'll cry, and before long you'll be doing your own top five lists.
In this funny, contemporary first novel, a young pop music junkie finds that his myriad diversions after the breakup with his longtime girlfriend are ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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