I found HOMEWORK by Geoff Dyer (Canongate Books, £11.99) such an excellent read that it has immediately gone into my personal Special Collection of non-fiction books, the only criteria being that I have 100% loved them, and have talked about them incessantly. For the record, these include CONCRETOPIA and OUTSKIRTS by John Grindrod, THE SEE-THROUGH HOUSE by Shelley Klein, and THE DAY THAT WENT MISSING by Richard Beard. Perhaps I’ve loved all of these non-fiction titles because they present as lyrical memoirs and/or social history, focussing on ‘ordinary’ lives and aspirations. In the main, they’re anchored around houses, suburbs, family, and a mid-20th century timespan, especially the Sixties and Seventies. Geoff Dyer is both a novelist, and a non-fiction author; he’s also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and he writes knowledgeably and evocatively about a domestic world that no longer exists. It’s no surprise that HOMEWORK won the TLS Ackerley Prize 2026 in July, the only literary prize dedicated to memoir and autobiography. In HOMEWORK, Dyer returns to his childhood: born in 1958, he self-admittedly grew up in ‘a world shaped by the Second World War’, with parents to match. Equally, though, the book jacket also suggests that HOMEWORK is a ‘celebration of opportunities afforded to Dyer’s generation’, and it ends, indeed, with him winning a place at Oxford University, having attended a grammar school. Although I’m younger than Dyer, I recognised so many aspects of the detailed life he writes about: ‘the fence … was regularly creosoted by my dad’ (my dad too, I could smell the creosote as I read that line) and in the garden there were jars ‘filled with water and jam, attracting wasps which then drowned’ - my uncle had these too! (I found myself sending screenshots of pages to my sister.) He writes of posters in teenage bedrooms, of swapping LPs, of 1970s sitcoms on the TV, and, most fascinatingly, of the wartime stiff-upper-lip and silences of his parents, who had lived through World War Two (as mine also did). I recognised so much of his world, and the narrative is beautifully served up, bristling with pin sharp historical data and a wicked sense of humour, leaving no details of his adventures with dating girls unmentioned! About his mother and father, in particular, Dyer writes with curiosity, unsentimental observation, yet also with tender memory. The book closes with the deaths of both parents. One of the book’s saddest lines, after the death of Dyer’s father, reads: ‘I cycled back to Woodlands Road, along the familiar dark, roads, to the house where the three of us had lived: my mum, my dad and me. Now it was just me.’ I can’t recommend this book highly enough - treat yourself, you won’t regret it.
HOMEWORK by Geoff Dyer (Canongate Books, £11.99)