A Book of Two Halves: Football Short Stories

by Nicholas Royle, Irvine Welsh (Contributor), Geoff Nicholson (Contributor)

This is a collection of 23 football stories, including stories by Irvine Welsh, Iain Sinclair, Glyn Maxwell, Geoff Nicholson, Kim Newman, and Liz Jensen. It also includes poems about football by John Hegley. The plots involve a riotous Hibernian Saturday night and a hazardous visit to White Hart Lane.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Nicholas Royle is an English writer. He is the author of seven novels, two novellas and a short story collection. He has edited sixteen anthologies of short stories. A senior lecturer in creative writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short stories as signed, limited-edition chapbooks. He works as a fiction reviewer for The Independent and the Warwick Review and as an editor for Salt Publishing.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

My interest in football can be written on the back of a postage stamp but there are some great names in this book and trusting Nicholas Royle as editor I decided to give it a shot (pun intended).

And it is a solid anthology. A few of the tales are perhaps too reverential towards football for my liking, their drive requiring at least some of the knowledge of the game to be totally effective, and a couple appear no more than reminisces for a subject which in itself holds no interest, but there's more than enough here to entertain and the quality of the writing is high throughout.

Favourites include M John Harrison's axe in the face story "I Did It", Glyn Maxwell's "Injured Men Are Talking", Iain Sinclair's "Hardball", Graham Joyce's bittersweet "A Tip From Bobby Moore", Geoff Nicholson's hilarious "The Visiting Side", Liz Jensen's manic "Sent Off", Mark Morris' "The Shirt" (with an elegiac ending that almost drew a tear), and Christopher Fowler's "Permanent Fixture" which manages to summarise the beautiful game in one sentence: "it smells of frying onions, and will beat the shit out of you if you resist it". This last line of the book is a great one to end on.

Published in 1996, the book also captures a slew of writers who have have quite considerable careers since. The contents page seems quite radical for the time, each author bio an embryo of what was to come. It's well worth seeking out.