Nonfiction is a strange, alchemical business. In the knowledge that a good writer can make any subject sing, one of the books I’m looking forward to most in 2025 is The Season: A Fan’s Story (W&N, November), in which Helen Garner watches her grandson, Amby, play Aussie rules football during one Melbourne winter. Such territory sounds, I know, slight and even parochial; on paper, I have less than zero interest in footy down under. But this is Garner we’re talking about: Australia’s greatest writer of nonfiction. It’s certain to be epic.
November, though, is a long way off. Get a more immediate fix of Garner with the first UK publication of her collected diaries, How to End a Story (March, W&N), a book that concludes with one of the most candidly brutal accounts of the end of a creative marriage I’ve read. And if you’re in the market for memoir – diaries being autobiography’s first draft – some good ones are en route. I’m eager for Adelle Stripe’s Base Notes: The Scents of a Life (White Rabbit, February), an olfactory account of growing up in the north of the 1980s; Joe Dunthorne’s Jewish family memoir, Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance (Hamish Hamilton, March); and Geoff Dyer’s Homework (Canongate, May), a portrait of the author as a working-class boy who keeps passing exams.
