Aktion	Zweigstelle	Standorte	Status	Frist	Vorbestellungen
Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 11., Gottschalkgasse 10	Standorte: FS.E DR Horn	Status: Verfügbar	Frist:	Vorbestellungen: 0

Summary Is it possible to share your life with someone whose record collection is incompatible with your own? Can people have terrible taste and still be worth knowing? Do songs about broken hearts and misery and loneliness mess up your life if consumed in excess? For Rob Fleming, thirty-five years old, a pop addict and owner of a failing record shop, these are the sort of questions that need an answer, and soon. His girlfriend has just left him. Can he really go on living in a poky flat surrounded by vinyl and CDs or should he get a real home, a real family and a real job? Perhaps most difficult of all, will he ever be able to stop thinking about life in terms of the All Time Top Five bands, books, films, songs - even now that he's been dumped again, the top five break-ups. Memorable, sad and very, very funny, this is the truest book you will ever read about the things that really matter.Review Review 'My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame.' Rob Fleming, record shop owner, obsessed with pop music, compulsive list-maker (favourite American films; all-time top five favourite books; five most memorable split-ups...) finds himself in his 30s and going nowhere; even his (failed) romances seem to be a scrambled replay of his first rejection, by Alison Ashworth in 1972, at the age of 13. Nick Hornby was catapulted to media stardom with Fever Pitch, his hilarious, prize-winning account of a fan's obsession with football. There is no football in this novel, but fans may well find a kindred spirit in Rob, who narrates this funny, sad tale with intelligence, wit, and self-deprecation, plus the all-round sheer blokeishness that Hornby captures so well. (Kirkus UK) Review A rollicking first novel from British journalist Hornby that manages to make antic hay of a young (barely) man's hopeless resolve not to come of age. Rob Fleming is the sort of precocious loser whose life has gone so unaccountably wrong that some deep romantic grief must be invoked to explain it. "The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking," according to Rob, "are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives." As a case in point, the 35-year-old Rob not only listens to these songs himself but peddles them - as the founder and proprietor of Championship Vinyl, a seedy vintage-record store in a quiet back alley of North London. Business is hardly booming these days, and the shop would have gone under long ago but for Rob's lawyer-girlfriend Laura, who has propped it up time and again with cash from her own very ample pool. Once she dumps Rob, however, everything is suddenly on the verge of collapse - fiscally and emotionally - and Rob is forced to ask himself how he landed in such a mess. Naturally, he has no idea, so he proceeds to look up his ex-girlfriends - all the way back to high school - and ask them why things never worked out. As a pilgrimage, Rob's quest bears more resemblance to Monty Python than Chaucer, and his own inability to put two and two together somehow endears him to the very women whose affections he seems least able to requite. Reality bludgeons him in the end, and he succeeds, as the plot is spun, in drawing a few morals that surprise him by their simplicity and point toward a happy ending - or at least a second chance. Fast, fun, and remarkably deft: a sharp-edged portrait that manages at once to be vicious, generous, and utterly good-natured. (Kirkus Reviews)Biography Nick Hornby was born in 1957 and worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. His books are FEVER PITCH (1992), HIGH FIDELITY (1995) and ABOUT A BOY (1998). In 1999 he won an E. M. Forster award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in north London.