May 7th 2009
£9.99
320 pages
Demy Paperback
ISBN
9780955647659

Heartland (Demy Paperback) by Anthony Cartwright

Buy Now Price £9.99

A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime – Broadcast in October 2009

It is Spring 2002 in the Black Country, with local elections looming. A mosque is being built on the site where Cinderheath’s iconic steelworks once centred 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’.

Rob, once a professional footballer like his famous father, is now a track-suited teaching assistant, sympathetic to the children of families he knows too well. On the pitch, as the BNP prowl the touchlines, he finds himself facing Zubair, the brother of his missing best friend. Both men are bound together by the mystery of Adnan’s disappearance.

In this richly-imagined novel about grass-roots politics, football and the far right in a multicultural 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

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

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

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