The Season

“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

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.