"It is simply the best football based work of fiction" - David Taylor, The London Magazine
"He delivers, with a kind of deceptive gaiety some murderous blows at the fatheads who populate professional football." - Benny Green
The title really is what this book is about, a fantastical ambition, but most importantly a mix of diverse characters who achieve it. Following the local school master's adapted teaching 'Theory', inspirational team performances, exemplary captaincy and wily chairmanship, with great good fortune the Wanderers play for the greatest domestic cup prize in club football.
"Book writing can be a tedious job needing some incentive to keep one at it. The impulse here was 'can this unbelievable feat be made to sound like the truth even though it didn't happen?' So I stacked the cards - a foreigner with remarkable theories, two young men with good reason for having quit top-class football, a Chairman of Napoleonic ability. Then I dredged up memories of 1930 when I was an unqualified teacher, 18 years old and playing that single season for South Milford White Rose when we won a final which never ended (pitch invasion and furious fights are not new things). I learnt much of rural life during that long-gone autumn, winter and early spring. But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want to believe it." - JL Carr
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup
Publication Essentials
Dimensions: 20 x 13cm (7.75 x 5")
Printed in Great Britain on quality paper, this standard-sized paperback is type-set and formatted by the Quince Tree Press in keeping with JL Carr's original style and authorial autonomy.
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Reviews
This is certainly a very funny book but it is much more than that. I read somewhere that a football writer complained that the plot is not believable. That is an extraordinarily dim comment to make. This is fiction - where anything can be made to happen.
A story ostensibly about a village football team that challenges itself to win the FA Cup, but is in reality more about the strength of people coming together at the right time. We watch and learn how they overcome various obstacles and deal with the inevitable trials of success, but also how they inadvertently generate those magical moments in time that carve happiness and longing deep in our minds. In this sense, this novel is not so far removed from a Month in the Country, which is in my mind a short masterpiece. Those moments will only ever be memories; they will never come again. So treasure them while they’re being lived! And hold them dear when they are gone. JL Carr does all this in a light and witty narrative. Better than (for example) Wodehouse, with whom he is often compared, as Carr does not have an ounce of cynicism in his writing. The story is carried along by wonderfully developed characters, we love or hate them all. I cannot recommend this novel enough.
I treasure my copy of Steeple Sinderby, one of the funniest (but true to
life; even if metaphorically rather than literally) books I've read.