High Fidelity

High Fidelity is a novel by the British writer Nick Hornby, first published in 1995. It was his first novel, and it has sold more than a million copies.

Rob Fleming is thirty-five and owns a record shop in London called Championship Vinyl. Laura, his girlfriend, who is a lawyer, has just left him, and the book is his account of the crisis that follows. He does not know why she left, and finding out is what he spends the book doing.

He and the two men who work in the shop spend their time discussing the finer points of making a compilation tape and constructing top-five lists about anything at all. Rob turns the habit on his own life and makes a list of the five most memorable split-ups he has had, which turns out to be a way of avoiding the question he is actually asking.

The book was adapted into a film in 2000, a Broadway musical in 2006 and a television series in 2020, and it was listed on the BBC's Big Read survey in 2003.