Iron Towns

A powerful lament for England's diminished regions ... visionary,A gritty, moving elegy for an abandoned, once-thriving section of society, and the best football novel since The Damned United,An elegiac tale that mixes myth and melodrama to dazzling effect.,A first-class sports novel ... endows football with a mythic status,Iron Towns is one of those rare things - a book that lives up to its ambitions, and those ambitions are big. It's a dense but tender portrait of a world that few bother to notice, much less write books about. I loved the layering of the mythic and the prosaic, the intimate and the broad. An impressive and distinctive novel,A writer with a wonderful ear ... 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,Praise for Heartland:

This is what fiction should be and what readers want it to be: passionately engaged. The ambition and achievement shine forth from every sentence,A talented and thoughtful writer,An impressive novel, glimpsed through the prism of a pair of football matches