I don’t think there’s any question that The Boys of Summer has always been larger than a baseball book. On the surface, at least, it’s about the 1952, 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers – their triumphs and their inevitable failings. They were good enough to get to the World Series, but not good enough to win. But they were a great team, and Jackie Robinson is a prominent part both of the story of the book, and of the team as a player. But it’s so much larger than that, because it’s really a story about Roger Kahn and his father.

The first half of the book is written somewhat chronologically, about those two seasons, and Roger Kahn’s own place in them. He was a young reporter, just learning how to become a writer, and all of this was happening around him. Then, in the second half of the book, he goes back and revisits the players 20 or so years later. There’s real depth in every element of the book, to my mind, as a reader. It touches on things that are much larger than sports.

It’s quite a sentimental, bittersweet book, isn’t it? – because he revisits them when they’re all over the hill?

Yes. I’ve heard Roger Kahn say that the quintessential story of sport is the fact that great athletes die two deaths. They die the first death when they no longer play their sport, and then they also die, of course, like all of us do. Their second death is, in many cases, much much later. Roger Kahn goes back to see Jackie Robinson, who was this extraordinary lion of a player – but at the end, by the time he sees him, is having troubles with his son. He’s come crosswinds a bit with the civil rights movement. And Jackie Robinson is one of the players on that team who died young as well. So there is this tremendous bittersweet nature to the book, which is a big part of it. There’s a humanity to the book. There’s this exciting baseball part in the first half and then this bittersweet part of it in the second half that is, in many ways, even more touching.

Do they end up doing fairly drab things later in life?

They do in many ways. One is working in a bar; one is working in construction. (This wouldn’t necessarily be the case today, since baseball players make so much more money.) But in other ways they were almost heroic. They had this glorious past and now they’ve come back into society, into civilisation. It’s really very interesting to see how these great players are now living their lives. Some are living it with more success than others. But that effort to try to be “normal” – for lack of a better word – I found to be really touching. I didn’t find it to be heartbreaking at all.

Simon Kuper recommends:

It’s very funny, about an obsessive Arsenal fan, and was also almost the book that started [football books] all off. Pete Davies’s All Played Out came out in 1990, and has been called the John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus. Because when Pete Davies’s book did well, publishers realised there was a literate football fan audience out there, and then Nick Hornby came and proved it with a vengeance in 1992. It was just when memoirs were coming into fashion, about the same time as Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? And you could say that Fever Pitch really launched the genre of serious football books.

Nick Hornby doesn’t revel in, “Oh I’m such a football geek, isn’t that funny?” He treats it as something suspect. And he describes how he uses supporting Arsenal to escape his parents’ divorce, problems with women, the question of what to do with his life, and lots of things like that. It’s also a bit of a social history of England from the sixties through to the eighties. And nobody had written a book like it – it was completely original. Nick Hornby was a not very successful, lower-middle-class bohemian, and when he was telling friends at the time, “Oh I’m writing a book about being an Arsenal fan,” his friends all thought, “Oh God! Poor Nick”. Nobody expected this book. It’s completely honest and it’s very funny. The only problem with it is that it’s a little bit formless: It’s a book to dip into, rather than to read through. It doesn’t quite have a narrative, but every little bit is brilliant.

Does it capture what it’s like to be a fan? Is it true for a lot of people?

There are definitely moments of recognition. I’m not an obsessive fan of one club, and I hope I haven’t used football to escape life. But there are definitely strong moments of recognition, of football as this place of safety. Life is complicated but when you’re a football fan you’re gathered with others who are like you, and nobody judges you. It’s like being a member of a family, where there are no standards, where the only criterion is, ‘Are you an Arsenal fan?’ and then you’re accepted. Outside the Arsenal stadium life is scary, you have to be adequate, but as a football fan you don’t have to be adequate and that’s a great joy. What I’ve discovered more and more is that when you watch football and support your team, it is all a game. And that’s a terrific release, because as adults we have children and responsibilities and pressures, but when you’re just a supporter, you don’t.

Dr Debanjan Chakrabarti recommends:

I think Open is one of the best sport autobiographies I have ever read. It is obviously very interesting to find out about [Andre Agassi] taking recreational drugs and the effect it had on him. There was quite a bit of discussion within the tennis administration about stripping him of some of his titles because of that confession, and then they buried it under the carpet and moved on. But I think it was a very interesting confession to make so many years after the incident had happened. He was on crystal meth which is not a performance-enhancing drug but more for recreation. But even then, because it is not accepted within sport and especially in tennis, there was a lot of controversy around it. And I thought it was bold of him to talk about it.

There is another very interesting incident that he narrates in Open and that is his memory of a match he played when he was 13 or 14 against the American player Jeff Tarango who was a talented junior at the time, and he talks about how Tarango cheated in the game and how it shattered him as a boy. He carried that kind of grudge against Tarango all through his adult life.

What happened?

Well in those days during the junior matches, even if it was a fairly serious competition, there were no umpires or linesmen. Instead they relied on each other to call the balls out. Agassi mentions a critical final when Tarango called an obviously in ball out. Agassi was so taken aback that he lost the match.