Their family might look a little different from the outside, but there's enough love to go around, regardless of people's ages. Luckily, Annie comes around to the idea of baby Rufus, especially when she and Mark get pregnant, too. It's just one of those things that happens in life, and it's totally out of her control. The truth is that it's not her fault that Alicia and Sam slept together, though it has nothing to do with the fact that she got pregnant young. When he goes through a similar situation with Alicia, though, Annie's torn apart and blames herself. His first book, a collection of critical essays on American novelists, was published in 1992 and was quickly followed by his celebrated soccer memoirFever Pitch. Perhaps that's why she's so set on making sure Sam takes care of himself and heads to college. Born in Redhill, Surrey, England, Nick Hornby graduated from Cambridge University and worked for a time as a book reviewer and a teacher of English to foreign students.

We admire Annie's dedication, especially in the face of a curveball like a kid. She wasn't any great shake at school, she says, but she was so unhappy about not finishing her education that she pushed herself twice as hard as she would have done. You could even argue that she's overtaken herself. Slam Paperback Octoby Nick Hornby (Author) 479 ratings Kindle 11.99 Read with Our Free App Audiobook 0.00 Free with your Audible trial Hardcover 17.49 8 Used from 14.24 3 New from 18.26 Paperback 15.00 66 Used from 1.36 6 New from 9.50 3 Collectible from 2.29 Audio CD 10.98 10 Used from 4.99 1 New from 10. She's caught up, more or less, on all the things she missed because of me. No, it wasn't optimal, but she managed (and then some): You know, because she got pregnant with him when she was sixteen. She wants Sam to succeed in life and have opportunities that she didn't get. This seems not so unreasonable to me as Sam does not seem completely grounded in reality himself (though much more so by the end of the book).Sam's mom is hard working, loving, and laid back (as much as parents can be, anyway, without being too laidback). One possible explanation is that this is just Sam's story and the Sam of the future remembers his dreams in a different way than he dreamt them.

(And I don't recall anything supernatural in any other of Hornby's novels, though this book seems aimed at a younger audience than his other works.) Possibly they are intended to be supernatural, or perhaps meant to be ambiguous. Note: nothing else in the novel seems supernatural, but at least to me these dreams do. Then what happens around him in reality in the future seems to be uncannily similar to what was in his dream (e.g., the name of a child, a certain person he would recognize from his dream that he hadn't met at the time of the dream).Īre these dreams intended by Hornby to be supernatural? In the story, he recounts one or two dreams where he is transported to a day in the future. In Nick Hornby's novel Slam, the main character, Sam, narrates his story which happened in the past.

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