From the beloved master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of being a grandparent.

Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence. 

Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.

The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. Here we find Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, utterly content and unafraid to bask in it—a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers.