(P/B) THE FOOTBALL FACTORY - JOHN KING

With his first book, John King has written a cult classic for our times: telling, for once, the truth about soccer violence. Forget the armchair nostalgia of FEVER PITCH of the translantic reportage of AMONG THE THUGS - this is a book that gets inside. A collection of linked stories, The Football Factory centres on Vince Matthews, a seasoned Chelsea hooligan who represents a disaffected society operating by appalling rules. From first-hand experience, we are shown the usual mix of social degradation, unemployment, racism, excessive drink, bad sex and casual violence - the facts of life -but also how they fall into a political context of surveillance, media manipulation and division. Football violence has not been eradicated, it has simply been moved out of the grounds and beyond the cameras. Like the slaughter of Iraqi conscripts in the Gulf War, hooligans and what they do have been pushed under the carpet: out of sight, out of mind. This is what The Football Factory is about. (From the publisher) "The best book I've read about football and working-class culture in Britain in the nineties. Buy, steal or borrow a copy now" - Irvine Welsh "Fever Pitch with testosterone and eight pints of lager. Like Fever Pitch, it is not exclusively a novel about football. This is a chronicle of a lost tribe - the white, Anglo-Saxon, heterosexual who is fed up with being told he is crap. It is the story of a flight from fear by a group of Londoners who have seen the present and know it does not work-King writes powerfully with a raw realism and clear grasp of a culture which has been denied but cannot be ignored" - Glasgow Herald