Season, The: A Fan's Story by Helen Garner; 2025. Hardcover.

From Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of family life.In The Season, she trains her 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.