The World Cup novel for the Summer

— Esquire

Similar in scope to Don DeLillo’s Underworld – and such ambition pays

— Observer

What a book! This is what fiction should be

— David Peace, Books of the Year, Guardian

It is Spring 2002, with local elections looming. A mosque is being built on the site where Cinderheath’s iconic steelworks once dominated the town. ‘The Tipton Three’, from just down the road, are imprisoned in Guantanomo; the BNP expect to win new seats on the council. St. George’s flags fly from cars and windows: the World Cup is beginning, England to play Argentina. But first, a controversial Sunday-league football game must take place, billed by the press as ‘a match to spark a race war’.

In this richly-imagined novel of grass-roots politics, football and the far right in a multi-ethnic town, Anthony Cartwright audaciously enters the heartland of post-9/11 Britain.

A great book about football … captures just what it’s like to be engaged in the complex plot of a game, whether as fan or a player. If you read a better complement to the game this year you’ll be lucky

— When Saturday Comes

An impressive novel, glimpsed through the prism of a pair of football matches

— D. J. Taylor, Guardian

This brilliant realised novel expertly interweaves the stories of friends on either side of a stricken community’s social and religious divide

— Esquire

A writer with a wonderful ear for dialect 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

This slice-of-life novel is ambitiously structured. A welcome and timely take on England now, from a talented and thoughtful writer

— Carol Birch, Independent

Beautiful, moving and important. Victories and defeats on and off the pitch are tenderly rendered in this acute portrait of identity and community

— Catherine O’Flynn

Heartland has similar scope to Don DeLillo’s Underworld – and such ambition pays . . . This impressive novel succeeds in giving voice to a part of the country that is more frequently spoken about than listened to

— Phil Oltermann, Guardian

The real strength of this novel lies in the vivid Black Country vernacular and the framework carefully constructed to fit the football match in Sapporo

— Daily Mail

Movingly traverses the territory of the human heart

— Anita Sethi, Independent on Sunday

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