Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game

Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times and Evening Standard

Karl Ove Knausgaard is sitting at home in Skåne with his wife, four small children and a dog. He is watching football on TV and falls asleep in front of the set. He likes 0-0 draws, cigarettes, coffee and Argentina.

Fredrik Ekelund is away in Brazil, where he plays football on the beach and watches matches with friends. Fredrik loves games that end up 4-3 and teams that play beautiful football. He likes caipirinhas and Brazil.

In Home and Away, two writers use football and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil to reflect on life and death, art and politics, class and literature and the most important question: was this the best football championship ever?


[It is] fascinating, insightful... Engrossing. -- Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

Home and Away is deeply intelligent, enjoyable and sometimes funny. -- Simon Kuper, Financial Times, Book of the Year

An entirely engrossing exchange of ideas, affection and memory… [A] genuinely engaging two-hander of real affection and insight. -- Barney Ronay, Literary Review

Knausgaard is a writer with an astonishing ability to elevate the prosaic… As a reading experience, Home and Away is diverting, indulgent and stealthily enjoyable. Just as it probably was to write., Esquire, Book of the Year

At its core, Home and Away is a story about two men doing what they can to keep a friendship afloat, even from continents away., New Yorker