Iron Towns
Published on 19. May 2016
978-1-78283-201-0 (ISBN)
Description
Twenty years ago, Liam Corwen and Dee Dee Ahmed were on the cusp of a better future, Liam as a promising footballer and Dee Dee as a singer in a girl band. Now they're both eking out an existence back in their home town.
As the old steelworks rust and the local football club limps towards relegation and liquidation, Dee Dee recalls the tragic events that changed their lives. Liam thinks back to the great players of the past, and wonders: could redemption, greatness even, still wait for them, here among the abandoned cranes and docks and housing estates?
Evoking the landscape and myth of old, forgotten England, Iron Towns is a story of our dreams of youth, football, and industrial progress - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past.
New paperback edition featuring Cartwright's acclaimed essay on the EU referendum.
As the old steelworks rust and the local football club limps towards relegation and liquidation, Dee Dee recalls the tragic events that changed their lives. Liam thinks back to the great players of the past, and wonders: could redemption, greatness even, still wait for them, here among the abandoned cranes and docks and housing estates?
Evoking the landscape and myth of old, forgotten England, Iron Towns is a story of our dreams of youth, football, and industrial progress - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past.
New paperback edition featuring Cartwright's acclaimed essay on the EU referendum.
Reviews / Votes
A powerful lament for England's diminished regions ... visionary * Guardian * A gritty, moving elegy for an abandoned, once-thriving section of society, and the best football novel since The Damned United * Daily Mail * An elegiac tale that mixes myth and melodrama to dazzling effect. * Metro * A first-class sports novel ... endows football with a mythic status * Mail on Sunday * Iron Towns is one of those rare things - a book that lives up to its ambitions, and those ambitions are big. It's a dense but tender portrait of a world that few bother to notice, much less write books about. I loved the layering of the mythic and the prosaic, the intimate and the broad. An impressive and distinctive novel -- Catherine O'Flynn A writer with a wonderful ear ... and an unblinking sense of Britain as it is today. Anthony Cartwright's patient, attentive storytelling shines a glowing light on areas of our common experience that the English novel usually consigns to darkness -- Jonathan Coe Praise for Heartland:This is what fiction should be and what readers want it to be: passionately engaged. The ambition and achievement shine forth from every sentence -- David Peace A talented and thoughtful writer -- Carol Birch An impressive novel, glimpsed through the prism of a pair of football matches -- DJ Taylor
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Profile Books Ltd
Product notice
Reflowable
ISBN-13
978-1-78283-201-0 (9781782832010)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Anthony Cartwright
Iron Towns
Book
05/2016
Serpent's Tail
€36.08
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Person
Anthony Cartwright was born in Dudley in 1973. His first novel The Afterglow won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for several other literary prizes; his second novel Heartland was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime; his third novel How I Killed Margaret Thatcher was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and was a Fiction Uncovered 2013 selection. He worked as an English teacher in schools in London and the Midlands for over ten years and is currently a First Story writer-in-residence at two schools. He lives in London with his wife and son.
