… yes, the fourth and final book in the Ageing Tennis Player Quartet: The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player!
Timed to track the 2026 US Open, you can hear every episode of the book via our Spotify channel from Sunday 23 August; you can hear the Audiobook on Audible or even listen to a podcast review created by our very own Julian Pilkington Sterne with Mork and Mindy down in the NOP basement – you can even buy the book in hardcover, paperback or E-Book format if you’re so inclined! The choices are almost endless! But what’s it all about? I’m glad you asked!
There comes a point in every sporting life when the trophies stop mattering and the institutions take over.
In The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player, Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch wakes up to discover that time has moved on without him, by more than a decade. Tennis clubs have changed. Society has changed. Technology has changed. And somewhere along the way, Andy himself has been quietly mislaid.
Set in a Liverpool hospice that may or may not be a prison, a laboratory, or something stranger still, this fourth and final Confessions book follows Andy as he pieces together what happened after Paris, after Melbourne, after Wimbledon and why everyone seems so keen for him to stay exactly where he is.
Populated by club secretaries, rogue care workers, obsessive consultants, resurrected lovers, and an increasingly rebellious fleet of drones, Fantastic Confabulations is part satire, part love story, part institutional nightmare and part last stand.
Tennis is still there. The bar bill certainly is. But this time the real match is against forgetting, control, and being written out of your own story.
Absurd, unsettling, tender and funny, this is the book where Andy finally learns what it means to win – and what it costs to be remembered.
Here’s that podcast review I was telling you about, just to whet your appetite:
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The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player
Inspired by Rip Van Winkle, the short story by Washington Irving, The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player is the fourth and final book in this ‘Confessions’ series. Andy Murray wakes up twelve years late, trapped in a hospice that feels more like a prison, with his memory missing, his bar bill unpaid, and the US Open still somehow to be won. A darkly comic, surreal finale to the cult Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series.
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