A Natural
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened.
The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success.
Leah, the captain's wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.
A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.
'The pantheon of top-class soccer novelists has never been large, but with A Natural Ross Raisin can immediately be ushered into the Premier League executive box' TLS
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Football doesn’t often lend itself to outstanding fiction, but Ross Raisin’s third novel is not your typical book. Tom Pearman is not a superstar; he’s a fledgling professional just released by his boyhood Premier League club and facing up to life in English football’s fourth tier. Tom’s also confronting his homosexuality. Raisin’s writing is at times astonishing: he captures Tom’s deeply conflicted emotions and aggression with an unflinching honesty. A Natural studies far more than just football’s lingering issue with gay players—it zooms in on its damaging “banter” culture, precariously fractured egos and the lonely lives of young footballers’ wives with marvellous subtlety.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This slow-building novel examines the unique pressures and trappings of the hypermasculine world of professional English soccer. After being cut from the national youth team, 19-year-old Tom reluctantly signs with Town, a middling squad floundering at the bottom of its division. There, Tom still fights for playing time alongside Easter, the team's underperforming captain, who has a bad habit of reading message boards after losses. Most of the narrative bounces back and forth between Tom and Easter's wife, Leah, a young mother painfully alone in her marriage. The author skillfully interweaves both characters' feelings of isolation, setting up a number of strong reveals with impressive restraint and control. Once Easter goes down with a devastating leg injury, the disintegration of his and Leah's marriage dovetails with Tom's burgeoning relationship. The resolution of both stories is suitably heartbreaking, but the implications resolve themselves too quickly in a rushed ending that feels out of place in a novel whose power resides in authorial deliberateness. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile sports novel with winning characters.
