The Season
On sale
5th November 2026
Price: £18.99
‘I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we spend together before he turns into a man.’
It’s footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson Amby’s under-16s team. She goes to every training session, shivering on the sidelines in her local park, swept up in the game’s epic theatre.
Here is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to be part of the community that gathers to watch its boys do battle, to gasp and cheer for the team as it fights for a place in the finals.
The Season is part dispatch from the frontlines of boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often disappears under too bright a spotlight, and part personal celebration, as Garner rejoices in the unexpected riches of her later years and the quotidian joys of family life. The result is a heartfelt, generously funny and exuberant book from one of our greatest living writers.
It’s footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson Amby’s under-16s team. She goes to every training session, shivering on the sidelines in her local park, swept up in the game’s epic theatre.
Here is a chance to connect with her youngest grandchild before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to be part of the community that gathers to watch its boys do battle, to gasp and cheer for the team as it fights for a place in the finals.
The Season is part dispatch from the frontlines of boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often disappears under too bright a spotlight, and part personal celebration, as Garner rejoices in the unexpected riches of her later years and the quotidian joys of family life. The result is a heartfelt, generously funny and exuberant book from one of our greatest living writers.
Reviews
Writing... with love, humour, and passion.
The Season is marked by Garner's unsparing eye for detail and that superpower of detachment - a narrator who sees everything yet who is also deeply involved in the story, with emotional flourishes that rise when she watches her grandson
I understand zip about football or any sport, but I cried. Glorious
Inclusive and universal, curious and tender, perceptive and wise . . . The Season is joyful, but there is a carefully woven thread of melancholy running through it, and it is this that gives the book its lovely, old-gold sunset hue
Is there anything more thrilling than reading Helen Garner on everyday things such as haircuts, the Melbourne skyline, ageing, AFL tactics, friendship and half-time oranges? A book for all seasons - not just the footy one!
Garner is working in epic mode in The Season as she examines familiar themes and preoccupations: masculinity and its codes, the pleasures and contradictions of social groups, what it means to bear witness . . . Garner has always been an extraordinary stylist and in The Season her prose, athletic, soars and dances, just like those young footballers
Her perfect prose and sharp observations are a joy
Garner's prose is as luminous as ever
Startling in its candour and compelling in its nakedness . . . a marvellous paean to the glories of youth just shy of the treacheries of manhood
I love everything about this book - the clear-eyed acceptance of the effacement of old age before the dynamic imperative of youth; the way the baton is surrendered graciously, willingly; Garner's dogged fidelity as a witness, whether it's at a murder trial or sitting on the sidelines of a freezing footy field; that she is so intellectually interested in and unthreatened by masculinity
The sentences are precise and they sing. Garner turns from philosophical reverie on mortality, or violence, or masculine shame, to capturing the looseness and love with which a family talks footy . . . It's a book of gentle pleasures and deep meanings . . . As ever, when you put a Helen Garner book down and look up at the world again, you do so with newly sharpened eyes