About A Long Way Down

“If Camus had written a grown-up version of The Breakfast Club, the result might have had more than a little in common with Hornby’s grimly comic, oddly moving fourth novel…. It’s a bold setup, perilously high-concept, but Hornby pulls it off with understated ease. . . . This is a brave and absorbing book. It’s a thrill to watch a writer as talented as Hornby take on the grimmest of subjects without flinching, and somehow make it funny and surprising at the same time.”
-Tom Perrotta, in a starred review for
Publishers Weekly

“Hornby . . . expands far beyond his usual territory, exploring the changes in perspective that can suddenly make a life seem worth living and adroitly shifting the tone from sad to happy and back again. The true revelation of this funny and moving novel is its realistic, all-too-human characters, who stumble frequently, moving along their redemptive path only by increments.”
- Booklist (starred review)

“Highly moving and lively storytelling. Hornby’s gifts become more apparent with each outing.”
- Kirkus (starred review)

In his bestselling novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, Nick Hornby memorably evoked the inner lives of young men obsessed with pop culture and reluctantly slouching toward maturity. The novels not only elicited a chorus of critical praise, but also became the basis for successful feature films. In his third novel, How to Be Good (2001), the award-winning author broke new literary ground with his incisive portrayal of a fraying contemporary marriage, told from the wife’s point of view. A New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback, it was called “hilarious” by USA Today and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Now, Hornby boldly continues to expand his fictional range and technique in what is perhaps his most daring, accomplished, and moving novel to date, A Long Way Down.

On New Year’s Eve, four strangers make their way to the rooftop of a London apartment building called Toppers’ House. Their goal, however, is not celebration but obliteration. For various reasons, each one has decided that the time has come to put an end to his or her life. As they inadvertently meet and begin to share their stories, they find themselves citizens of a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer apply. And gradually, very gradually, they help one another to discover reasons to live, at least for the time being.

Hornby tells his story through the alternating, idiosyncratic voices of his four main characters. There is Maureen, the mousy, fifty-something mother of a mentally and physically incapacitated son, who has done little but care for him for the past twenty years; Martin, a disgraced former TV morning show host and ex-con; Jess, an obnoxious and explosive teenager; and JJ, the lone American in the bunch, an aspiring rock star.

New York has called Nick Hornby “a fine writer, swift and pointed, with a lighter, more mischievous heart than he lets on, and more sympathy for the devil than he admits to.” According to the New York Daily News, Hornby is “a sympathetic writer who actually likes the people whose stories he chooses to tell.” Nowhere are these qualities more evident than in his keenly awaited fourth novel.

In A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby poses deep questions about suffering, evil, spirituality, and the possibility of redemption with a deft, sly wit, an acute intelligence, and a contemporary cultural sensibility that are uniquely his. Challenging, tender, profane, ribald, acerbic, uplifting, and laugh-out-loud funny, it is a novel about suicide that turns out to have much more to do with life.