The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022 and is Dyer’s late masterpiece — a book about lateness written in his sixties that demonstrates his form to be still evolving, still capable of surprise. The ostensible subject is endings: the decline of great athletes (Federer, but also others), the late works of great artists (Beethoven, Turner, Coltrane, Dylan), the final periods of great thinkers (Nietzsche’s madness, Adorno’s last essays).
But the real subject is Dyer himself facing his own lateness — his consciousness that his career is closer to its end than its beginning, that his powers may be declining, that the things he loves (tennis, music, travel, drugs, sex) are receding. This personal dimension saves the book from being merely an anthology of interesting endings: it is animated by genuine anxiety and genuine curiosity about what it means to be “late” — late in a career, late in life, late in the game.
The book’s structure is characteristically Dyerian: associative, digressive, circling back on itself, making connections between apparently unrelated subjects (Federer’s backhand and Beethoven’s Opus 131; Turner’s dissolution into light and Nietzsche’s dissolution into madness). The method has reached a kind of perfection here: Dyer can hold a dozen threads simultaneously, weaving them into a pattern that feels both inevitable and improvisatory. The book is widely considered his finest since Out of Sheer Rage.
Collecting The Last Days of Roger Federer
First edition (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2022): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- First UK edition (Canongate, 2022): $15–$35
- Signed copies: $40–$100