It is a given that any book I recommend to my 14-year-old son will be declared by him as “boring” or, even more damningly, “noobish” – his current term of ultimate derision for all things pathetic and uncool.

So when, a couple of weeks ago, Nick Hornby’s publishers sent me a copy of his latest novel in preparation for this interview, I placed it on the hall table and said nothing. Sure enough, my son and the book disappeared upstairs. Within 48 hours, he had devoured it (see his review, below).

Slam is Hornby’s first teenage novel and the real surprise is that it has taken him 15 years to address a market with which he is so obviously and eminently in tune. Hornby is now 50 and only just ahead of my own generation. I love his writing and I’ve often envied what appears to be his eternal teen spirit. His own adolescent obsessions – football and music – launched his writing career. He then topped Fever Pitch and High Fidelity with About a Boy, the story of the unlikely friendship between the intrinsically unpaternal Will Freeman and Marcus, a tormented and awkward 12-year-old. About a Boy became an accidental crossover novel: written for adults, it proved hugely popular with teenagers. The obvious next question from his publishers was: how about writing directly for teens? And Hornby’s response must have plunged them into momentary despair. “I had to tell them that it had never occurred to me,” he says phlegmatically.

We are sitting in the attic flat that he uses for writing, a short walk from his home in North London. I had anticipated a dark, smoke-filled, bachelor den; in fact, it’s airy and neat, with foreign editions of his books lining one wall and snapshots of his sons, Danny, 14, Lowell, 5 and Jesse, 3, on the fridge door. He’s not exactly fame-adverse and he happily accepts that interviews, along with book-signing tours and readings, are part of the deal – “If you take the money you have to give something more than the book” – but you don’t have to spend long in his company to realise that he is incapable of any thrusting, self-promoting spin.

Slam tells the story of Sam, a hormonal, 16-year-old skateboarding nut whose world falls apart when his first serious girlfriend, Alicia, tells him that she’s pregnant. “I saw a very young couple around here pushing a pram and I thought, I know something about you – the girl – because a lot has been written about teenage mothers, but I’m not too sure about the boy. And that started something,” Hornby explains.

Sam occupies familiar Hornby territory. Like most of his fictional characters, he lives in Islington with his mum, who was herself a teenage mother. Alicia lives half a mile away with her mum, dad and brother in what might as well be the different planet of Highbury New Park. His home is a flat; hers is a big old house. Hers has books everywhere; his has a few. His mum works for the council; her mum is a councillor. Sam knows that Alicia’s parents think he is “some hoodie chav” who’s messed up their daughter’s future. Hornby’s point, as always, is to show us that how men – and now boys like Sam – look on the outside isn’t necessarily how they feel on the inside. His skill is delivering that point in a way that makes you laugh out loud while tugging at your soul.

Anyone who knows a little about Hornby will be aware that his own teenage son is autistic. Danny is a huge part of his emotional hinterland, but there are no parallels to be drawn between him and Sam.

Hornby does have teenage nephews and nieces – the four children of his writer sister Gill and her husband, the author Robert Harris. But mostly, his insight into the teenage mindset comes from the still vivid memories of his own adolescence. “That was the jumping-off point for me. How would I have felt at 16 if I had found out that I was going to be a dad? What would I have done?” He recalls once, when he was only slightly older, going through a pregnancy scare with a steady girlfriend. “It was two agonising weeks of waiting for a late period. And I can remember feeling, this is the end of the world, that there would be no university, no nothing. Even before that, it was something I was always aware of when I slept with girls. I was anxious all the time about not wanting to be a dad. I didn’t want it to happen.”

Hornby grew up in middle-of-the-road Maidenhead, Berkshire, and was 11 when his parents split up. His father, Sir Derek Hornby, was a successful self-made businessman who ended up in a Nash house in Regent’s Park while Nick remained with his mum in their comfortable but boxy Barratt home – an experience that gave him an early introduction to the class clashes that have become a perennial theme of his writing.

Like any child who lives through his parents’ divorce, he had the older-than-his-years knowing that comes from having witnessed something complicated and adult happen. “You don’t analyse it as a teen, but you certainly learn what to say and what not to say, and to self-edit.” Socially, throughout his teens, his fixations with football and music placed him “absolutely in the mainstream. I knew the names of the bands you were supposed to know. I wore the right clothes.” And yet inwardly he was as self-conscious and angst-ridden as his peers. “I was always prepared for emotional disaster – bad news was never a complete shock. That is the teen state – not knowing about life, the inability to predict how girls are going to behave, the not understanding of the dynamic between other people and the lack of confidence that comes from all that.” In Slam, Sam unburdens his soul to the world champion skateboarder Tony Hawk, or, more precisely, a poster of Hawk on his bedroom wall.

Hornby had originally thought that Sam would talk to a footballer “but there is something about football now that wouldn’t have worked for me – it’s ubiquitous”. And Hawk had the dual advantage of being a teen barometer. “Pretty much everyone under 30 knows who he is, and pretty much everyone over 40 has never heard of him,” Hornby explains. I confess that I read the entire text thinking that Hawk was a fictional character, an assumption that I now realise makes me very noobish indeed. But Hornby reassures me that he is only so enlightened himself because a few years ago, when asked to name his favourite book of all time, Hawk, a Californian who is now an ancient 39, selected High Fidelity.

“So I actually do have a poster of Tony Hawk, on a skateboard, holding my book. It’s in my little boy’s bedroom. My American publishers said this was quite a big deal because it was Tony Hawk. And I became aware that it’s true. Everyone knows who he is apart from grown-ups, and that enabled Sam’s conversations with him to remain more private, somehow.”