Juliet, Naked

From the beloved New York Times- bestselling author, a quintessential Nick Hornby tale of music, superfandom, and the truths and lies we tell ourselves about life and love.

Annie loves Duncan-or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter who stopped making music ten years ago. Annie stops loving Duncan, and starts getting her own life.

In doing so, she initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. Tucker's been languishing (and he's unnervingly aware of it), living in rural Pennsylvania with what he sees as his one hope for redemption amid a life of emotional and artistic ruin-his young son, Jackson. But then there's also the new material he's about to release to the world: an acoustic, stripped-down version of his greatest album, Juliet-entitled, Juliet, Naked.

What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And miles away, a restless, childless woman looks for a change? Juliet, Naked is a powerfully engrossing, humblingly humorous novel about music, love, loneliness, and the struggle to live up to one's promise.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Imagine, if you will, that the record store clerks of Nick Hornby's classic 1996 homage to music fandom have aged a few years past the cusp of 40. Instead of top five lists, they have a single obsession: a reclusive singer-songwriter from the eighties named Tucker Crowe, who, soon after releasing his magnum opus, Juliet, an ode to a failed adulterous romance with a beautiful Los Angeles scenester ("a darker, more fully realized collection of songs than Blood on the Tracks"), is last seen walking out of public toilet in a Minneapolis rock club and never records again. Rather than bullying the uninitiated masses with the poor fortune to wander into their store, these guys have the Internet, where they are free to spend most their days swapping trivia and ill-gotten photographs, and analyzing song lyrics in the privacy of their own self-policing superfandom.

Journalist and bestselling novelist Nick Hornby is best known for his portraits of dysfunctional Peter Pans -- clueless postmodern males in various stages of arrested development who discover, often to their chagrin, that growing up is a process involving far more than the passage of time.