Nick Hornby: 'Juliet, Naked' Trivia Quiz

Answer: The men's toilets in a Minneapolis nightclub

The book opens with a scene describing Duncan, who's a Tucker Crowe superfan, and his partner Annie, in the men's toilets of the Pits Club in Minneapolis - "dank, dark, smelly and entirely unremarkable" - having come from England for a holiday pilgrimage of places associated with the disappeared rock star. Duncan's obsessiveness with Tucker Crowe, to Annie's disgust, is captured beautifully by his insistence on her photographing him pretending to have a pee, in front of the urinal he assumes his hero must have used on that fateful night.

Answer: He decided his album was 'a fake bunch of crap'

Tucker Crowe's new album, 'Juliet' - described as one of the great 'break up' albums, rivalling Dylan's 'Blood on the Tracks' and Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' - is about the tortured end of his intense relationship with the beautiful Julie Beatty. However, in the Pits Club, Crowe confronts the truth that Julie was actually, as he later says: "an idiot, an airhead, a shallow, vain and uninteresting model who happened to be awfully pretty." Realising that everything he is doing is 'completely phoney', he walks out of the club and his rockband - and disappears. On his way out he goes into the men's toilets simply because he needs to pee - bizarrely this assumes a near-mythical significance for his coterie of fans, who wrongly imagine something momentous happened in the toilets to cause him to disappear.

Answer: Can Anybody Hear Me?

Duncan's obsession with Tucker Crowe has lasted over 20 years. At first, according to Annie, it was "like isolated episodes, sporadic attacks", but the arrival of the internet has enabled 'Crowology' to become a cult, with Duncan as its high priest. After 15 years in a relationship with Duncan (and essentially, by proxy, with Crowe too), and no children, Annie begins to review her life and ends the relationship with Duncan.

He tries to salvage it, but her determination is steeled when Duncan tells her: "But I do feel that Tucker is our child, in a way. ... he was very young when we met, and you adopted him."(!)

Answer: An original demo version of Crowe's last album

22 years after the release of his album 'Juliet', and purely to make some money, Tucker Crowe - although still in hiding - suddenly agrees to the release of the original unpolished demo version of 'Juliet', stripped down and devoid of backing instruments. Starved of new Crowe material for years, Duncan reviews it for his website, super-praising this 'naked Juliet' and saying it is superior even to the previously released and finished 'dressed' album. Goaded by Duncan's obvious lack of critical faculty about his rock hero's music, Annie writes a counter review.

Not only do other 'Crowologists', who are tired of Duncan's sense of superiority, agree with her assessment of the demo, but Tucker Crowe himself - who has been monitoring this website of 'pretty weird people' - emails privately to thank her for her perceptive comments! Tucker and Annie then begin a series of email exchanges.

Answer: Gooleness

Gooleness isn't a 'sophisticated' town: there's no arts cinema, gay community, or even a Waterstone's. When Duncan and Annie moved there separately 15 years earlier, they didn't so much consciously start a relationship as 'fell upon each other with relief'.

As the local museum curator, Annie's tasked by local town councillors with preparing a retro exhibition about Gooleness's heyday, 'the summer of 1964' - but the highlight of the exhibits that residents have contributed is the pickled eyeball of a fungally diseased shark that washed up on the beach that year.

Answer: Northern soul

When Annie pulls the plug on her loveless relationship with Duncan, she recruits her lesbian workmate Ros to help her find a man. Enter Barnesy, from the nearby seaside resort of Scunthorpe, a fan of music by lesser-known Tamla Motown artists, known locally as northern soul - "so called because people from the north of England, especially people in Wigan, liked it." Barnesy is an energetic, flailing dancer: "a heady mix of breakdancer, martial-arts warrior and Cossack." Local councillor Terry Jackson, the main advocate of the 'summer of 1964' exhibition, says that Barnesy and Gav are 'legends' and later gets them to open the exhibition.

Not quite so impressed by the 'legend' though is Annie, who turns down Barnesy's optimistic proposal for a one-night stand.

Answer: Watching TV and drinking

Despite the romanticised and exotic speculation on Duncan's website about what Tucker Crowe may have been doing under an alias for 22 years, the mundane truth is that he's been living quietly in Pennsylvania as a recovering alcoholic, and living off the earnings of his wife Cat.

At least she says she's his wife - he wasn't sober enough around that time to remember a marriage ceremony - and now the marriage, like his other relationships, is breaking down. Tucker has five children by four women, and apart from six-year-old Jackson, who he idolises and who idolises him, he's completely failed all of them.

Answer: He has a heart attack

It's a mild heart attack, but 20-year-old Lizzie, who's only recently learned she has three younger brothers and an older sister, uses Tucker's enforced hospitalisation to make arrangements for all his children and their mothers to visit him. Lack of paternal habits die hard with Tucker however, and he gets Annie to travel down from Gooleness to rescue him, bringing him and Jackson home with her.

After checking out any health risks for heart attack sufferers, Annie and Tucker sleep together.

Answer: Like a retired accountant

Duncan simply doesn't believe at first that this neat grey-haired man with spectacles is his long-time American rock hero Tucker Crowe, and he storms angrily off when Tucker introduces himself, thinking it's just her new boyfriend and that Annie is mocking him.

The photograph on Duncan's website that is allegedly of Crowe, taken by a stalking fan a few years back, is actually of Crowe's friend and neighbour, the grizzly Farmer John. Of the other answers given, it's Barnesy, the northern soul devotee, who is thought of by Annie as being like a martial arts warrior. Malcolm is the nervous and judgmental therapist that Annie sees for an hour on Saturday mornings, who gets depressed when she tries to end their sessions and drops the cost from £30 to a fiver to keep her.

Answer: So Where Was I?

Faced with the reality of this comeback from their fifties-something rock hero legend, no long the alcohol-fuelled wild child of rock, Duncan and the other Crowologists disown the new Tucker - although it seems some new fans like the new album! There are no neatly tied endings in Hornby's 'Juliet, Naked' - Annie may be pregnant with Tucker's child, and may have gone to America to be with him, but we don't know either of these things for sure; Tucker may now have a healthier relationship with his children, but that seems unlikely.

The truth about life, Tucker finally realised, was that nothing ever ended until you died, "and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you."