Homework: A Memoir

In this raucous coming-of-age memoir, novelist and journalist Dyer (The Last Days of Roger Federer) recalls growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in the English town of Cheltenham. Dyer’s industrious parents shared in Britain’s new working-class prosperity by buying the previously unimaginable luxuries of a house and car. Meanwhile, Dyer’s academic chops catapulted him into a toney grammar school, then to Oxford. Much of the book is a deep dive into the period’s boy culture and its obsessions with trading bubblegum cards and building models of WWII warplanes. Along the way, Dyer’s rich portraits of his parents reveal how they were at odds with the new Britain: his mother’s disfiguring birthmarks made her feel inferior to her newly glamorous surroundings, and his father was a tightwad, suspicious of consumerism but endlessly trustful of government authority. Dyer’s reminiscences brim with irony and black humor about an era that trumpeted progress, but was suffused with postimperial decline—in the family garden, Dyer’s father “aimed to grow all the carrots, peas, potatoes and other vegetables that we would need to live on in the event of a catastrophic collapse.” The result is an arresting and evocatively detailed take on family and society. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (June)