This book represents something of a swerve for Dyer, a project equal parts social and personal

Homework is a study of Dyer ’s childhood, but also of the worlds that it scampered through.

Homework represents something of a swerve for Dyer , a project equal parts social and personal.

Dyer gives us all the first fights and first fucks, before that all the mewling and pissed-off-with-his-schooling.

Dyer ’s father was a sheet-metal worker; his mother was a school dinner lady and then a hospital cleaner.

As a trio, they led the kind of respectable lower-middle-class life that was utterly normal but which has now taken on theair of a foreign country.

In the book, Dyer 's parents never fly on a plane (on a family holiday to London they visit Heathrow , just to look at it). The front room of their two -up, two -down is never used, except at Christmas , and dusty drinks cabinet proof of a family that had “a toe-hold in the age of plenty more than we needed”.

Dyer left England to fight the perfectibility of the society at the expense of the individual.

His father's lack of interest in everything he sort of almost didn’t have much of a self’, really.

His increasing sense of part of his life being incommunicable, “consolidated the habit of communicating less and less of what was important to my parents’. “We just gradually accepted this sort of silence settling between us”.