A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby

A book about four people who are thinking of killing themselves by jumping off a roof didn’t really strike my fancy.

But, Nick Hornby has a limited oeuvre just now… 5 novels (one of them young adult), some non-fiction focused on English Football¹ and music, and of course the delightful Believer articles on reading. So, sooner or later, I’m was going to have to give A Long Way Down a try, since it seemed unlikely that he was going to go off rambling about football or music too much in it.

The book popped up as available on PaperbackSwap.com, so I dropped a credit on it. As a bonus, whoever had it last left a hand drawn index-card-as-bookmark in it. So it had that going for it.

If High Fidelity, About a Boy, and How To Be Good tie for first place, then A Long Way Down comes in a not very distant and very readable second. But I think it only keeps from being a distant second by the presence of one of the four main characters, Jess, the crazy teenage girl; She’s got enough Quirk to her to keep the story going and interesting. The other characters are fine, but would probably fall flat without Jess stirring things up.

Then again, that’s not unreasonable considering they’re all suicidal.

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¹ I tried to read Fever Pitch. I really did. But it defeated me.