Annie places a photo of Tucker and Jackson on her fridge and invites Duncan round to make him see it, gleeful that he doesn't know the significance of it, and tells him she is in a relationship with him.

She ponders the years she has wasted with Duncan and ends up going to the pub with her friend Ros; she meets Gav and Barnesy, two Northern Soul dancers.

A mini-narrative describes the events which caused Tucker to end his career after hearing that he had a daughter, Grace, from the relationship before/during Juliet.

Reviewing the novel for The Observer, Julie Myerson wrote: Its likably bleak humour lies mostly in Hornby's pitch-perfect examination of male fandom and the almost sinister way in which the advent of the internet has fed and enabled it.

He's every bit as good as you'd expect on the crazed dynamic of the messageboard and the way in which the web has enabled fans to stalk and even, somehow, take possession of their idols from the safety of darkened bedrooms.

And Hornby knows how such an obsession can haunt a relationship: when Annie observes that she has long accepted the Crowe thing as 'part of the package, like a disability', you know all you need to know about life with Duncan.

However, so convincing is the Tucker Crowe who inhabits Duncan's mind that when we meet the real person pushing a trolley around a supermarket somewhere in America with his six-year-old son, it feels deflating.

[5]In his review for The Daily Telegraph, Roger Perkins wrote: A burnt-out case in rural Pennsylvania and a frustrated woman with an etiolated sense of self-worth on the east coast of England – what would happen if they met?

Hornby writes so well that you can almost smell the birdseed odour of badly dried clothes combined with failure that pervades Annie's house; his triumph, though, is to find infinite amounts of warmth and humour in this seeming world of desolation.

This can make one underestimate the quality of the prose: the fact that the sentences are straightforwardly deployed can conceal their unfussy elegance and their wit.

She is occasionally too perfect – completely self-aware and alert to the subtext of any conversation, always conscious of other people's clichés of word and action – and so can seem like a novelist's proxy.

The flipside of her intelligence and insight, however, is that we like her and want her to negotiate this defining period in her life successfully – whether that is with her nerdy ex-boyfriend, her ageing ex-rocker, or no one.

He concludes "this is a novel about people who have wasted massive chunks of their lives – Duncan in sterile rock-critic hermeneutics (he's like the worst-case-scenario future of Rob Fleming from High Fidelity); Annie in a dead romance and a dead-end job; and Crowe in sulky, creatively arid seclusion.

[8] The novel was adapted into a film helmed by the Girls director Jesse Peretz, produced by Judd Apatow, with Kate Winslet attached to star.