JULIET, NAKED

I uniformly love Nick Hornby’s nonfiction, but after adoring High Fidelity and About a Boy but then being lukewarm about the three novels that followed (except for How to Be Good, which I actively disliked), I was relieved to feel the old warm fuzzies for Juliet, Naked. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a solid return to form, centering on the unlikely friendship between Tucker Crowe, a cult singer-songwriter who vanished into obscurity under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago, and Annie, a middle-aged woman stuck in a dead-end relationship with an obsessive Crowe fan. (I was pleased to see a likable female narrator take center stage in a Hornby book, though I’ll admit Tucker, an aging version of the sensitive-man-boy-struggling-to-grow-up that Hornby does best, stole my heart more than I expected.) Hornby revisits his favorite themes of music, romance, and fandom, but with a new, welcome tinge of maturity and bittersweetness.