Busy Nick Hornby. New novel. New screenplay. Songwriter in his spare time. Interviewer. Interviewee. Dad of three.

An Education, the movie for which he wrote the screenplay and which his wife co-produced, has been flooded with critical praise, earned raves and scored the top audience prize for foreign films at Sundance earlier this year.

And with its prickly humour, warm spirit and rock-and-roll-obsessive theme, Hornby’s new book, Juliet, Naked, has fans and reviewers alike comparing it favourably to High Fidelity, his breakout novel of 14 years ago.

If all that weren’t enough, the 52-year-old Brit has also been having fun of late collaborating on songs with power-pop tunesmith Ben Folds.

“It’s not like I enter this zone where stuff pours out and I’m pleased with it. It feels like I’ve smoked myself sick and played too many computer games and then write in these frustrating little bursts,” he says. There you have it. One of the more successful authors of the past two decades writes between extended breaks of cigarettes and video games. But of course Hornby is being a bit humble about all this success. After all, three of his books have been turned into movies. One, Fever Pitch, has been turned into two movies.

His new movie—adapted from a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber—presents the tale of a 16-year-old girl in repressed 1960s England looking for something more out of life than the predictable stultifying future that seemingly awaits. Though his two latest projects are not related, his new novel Juliet, Naked also presents something of a call to arms against boredom, a warning for those who would simply let life happen to them. Ostensibly about a washed-up songwriter whose mysterious decision to give up performing 20 years earlier has given rise to a cultish clique of hopelessly devoted fans, the novel expands into the familiar Hornbyesque territory of loneliness, melancholy and despair. It might all be unbearable if not for Hornby’s razor-sharp, ultimately redemptive humour.