There's Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib grew up in Columbus, Ohio, during a golden age of basketball, watching local legends rise and others fall short. In this book he uses the game, and LeBron James in particular, to think about ambition, belonging, and what it means to make it out of where you come from. Structured like a basketball game in four quarters, with timeouts and intermissions written as poetry, the book moves between sports history, cultural criticism, and intimate memoir, touching on his own losses, a stretch in jail, and the pull of home. Abdurraqib writes with a lyric voice that turns a meditation on basketball into a meditation on mortality and the people we look up to.
Also by Hanif Abdurraqib
What you might want to know about There's Always This Year
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A poet and basketball fan weaves the game, especially LeBron James and Ohio, into a meditation on success, home, mortality, and who gets to make it.
Yes. Ann Patchett recommended it on PBS NewsHour's summer reading segment in 2024.
No. Basketball, especially LeBron James, is the through-line, but the book is really about home, ambition, grief, and mortality.
There's Always This Year was written by Hanif Abdurraqib, published in 2024 by Random House.
There's Always This Year is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, There's Always This Year takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
There's Always This Year is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
