Hornby has earned his own place on the London bestseller lists, and this on-the-edge tale of musical addiction just may climb the charts here. Rob takes comfort as well in the company of a touring singer, Marie La Salle, who is unpretentious and ``pretty in that nearly cross-eyed American way''-but life becomes more complicated when he encounters Laura again. Sometimes this can pall: readers may find that Rob's ruminations about listening to the Smiths and the Lemonheads-pop music helps him fall in love, he tells us-are more interesting than his list of five favorite episodes of Cheers. He takes comfort in the company of the clerks at the store, whose bantering compilations of top-five lists (e.g., top five Elvis Costello songs top-five films) typify the novel's ingratiating saturation in pop culture. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read. It has sold over a million copies1 and was later adapted into a feature film in 2000, a Broadway musical in 2006 and a TV series in 2020. After his girlfriend, Laura, leaves him for another man, he realizes that he pines not for sexual ecstasy (epitomized by a ``bonkus mirabilis'' in his past) but for the monogamy this cynic has come to think of as a crime. High Fidelity is a novel by British author Nick Hornby first published in 1995. The book dramatizes the romantic struggle of Rob Fleming, owner of a vintage record store in London. British journalist Hornby has fashioned a disarming, rueful and sometimes quite funny first novel that is not quite as hip as it wishes to be.
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