Iron Towns

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

The Iron Towns. Once the furnace heart of industrial England, now the valley is home only to fading dreams.

Twenty years ago, Liam, Dee Dee, Goldie and Mark had life stretching ahead of them: dreams of stardom, young marriages, money in their pockets. None of them can undo what made it all unravel. Now Liam is playing out the end of a modest career at Irontown FC. As the club limps towards relegation and liquidation, Liam's mind turns to history - and the past weighs heavily in the Iron Towns. The old steelworks rust, apple trees grow up through the abandoned factory floors and the land is haunted again by legends of the ancient kingdom of Mercia: Saxon princes, witches on the Heath, older myths creeping back to the edge of consciousness.

But it is more recent legends that fill Liam's mind: the great footballers tattooed across his body, images of famous cup finals, moments etched in the collective memory ... could redemption, greatness even, still wait for Liam and his friends, here among the crumbling estates and old dockyards

Shifting between the past and present, evoking the landscape and myth of a forgotten corner of England, Iron Towns is a stunningly inventive tale of dreams of youth, football and industrial progress - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past.

Reviews

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 OFlynn
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

Author Bio

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.