The Far Corner: A Mazy Dribble Through North East Football [Paperback]

Savagely funny and frequently moving...some of the humour is as full-blooded as a tackle by Bryan Robson... at times the author wanders off at a tangent, like Chris Waddle on a bad day, then that is the capricious nature of football. (DAILY TELEGRAPH )

Forget Nick Horby's FEVER PITCH, this is the football book of the new age, a mix of heroism, humour and Norman Hunter, but mainly humour. (SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR )

Britain's best ever football book. (NORTHERN ECHO )

Acidly funny, there is lots of relevant social comment. One of the best of the new genre. (IRISH TIMES )

* Covering the game at all levels from St. James's Park to Langley Park, from Roker to Willington, THE FAR CORNER is Harry Pearson's brilliant account of the north-east's experience of the 1993-1994 football season.

A book in which Wilf Mannion rubs shoulders with The Sunderland Skinhead: recollections of Len Shakleton blight the lives of village shoppers: and the appointment of Kevin Keegan as manager of Newcastle is celebrated by a man in a leather stetson, crooning 'For The Good Times' to the accompaniment of a midi organ, THE FAR CORNER is a tale of heroism and human frailty, passion and the perils of eating an egg mayonnaise stottie without staining your trousers.

THE BEST EVER BOOK ON FOOTBALL?
Praise for THE FAR CORNER, shortlisted for the 1995 William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award:

'Forget Nick Hornby's FEVER PITCH, this is the football book of the new age, a mixture of heroism, humour and Norman Hunter, but mainly humour' SUNDAY TIMES Books of the Year

'Pearson's odyssey is an oddity, a book on the people's game to make people laugh aloud ... Recommended' PHIL SHAW in the INDEPENDENT Books of the Year

'Britain's best ever football book' NORTHERN ECHO

'Wickedly funny ... easily storms home as our Book of the Year' FLY ME TO THE MOON, Middlesbrough FC fanzine

'Savagely funny and frequently moving ... Some of the humour is as full-blooded as a tackle by Bryan Robson, and if at times the author wanders off at a tangent, like Chris Waddle on a bad day, then that is the capricious nature of football' DAILY TELEGRAPH

'A brilliant read' NEWCASTLE JOURNAL

'Not a book for those who forbear to laugh or cry out loud ... the gags come thick and fast as Pearson uses his travels in the north-east of England during the 1993-94 football season to regale us with legend, anecdote, fact and history. As an acutely observant iconoclast, nothing, not even north-east leek-growing, is allowed to remain sacred ... The book is driven by the ebullience of Pearson's own indefatigable sense of humour ... A refreshing amalgam of scholarship and scurrility, it plugs into the mind-set of the true football fan' FRANCES EDMONDS in the GUARDIAN

Harry Pearson is a journalist and writer who contributes regularly to the GUARDIAN, WHEN SATURDAY COMES and a number of those men's magazines with women in bras on the cover. His second book, RACING PIG S AND GIANT MARROWS, was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook/DAILY TELEGRAPH Travel Book of the Year.