'A wonderful book - I was helplessly absorbed' - Bill Bryson
In his memoir
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Gunner
, former football journalist Patrick Mangan relives the agony and the ecstasy of growing up in rural Australia in the 1970s as an Arsenal-FC-supporting English immigrant cast helplessly adrift from the mother country.
Like Nick Hornby's
Fever Pitch
set among the gum trees and the dust, this is the tale of a scrawny Pommy kid falling desperately in love with the world game and the Gunners, as well as his unrelenting - occasionally unfathomable - crusade to convert the pagans of the Aussie outback to his noble cause.
'Utterly beguiling' - Geraldine Doogue, Radio National, Australia
'Exuberant and self-deprecating' -
The Age
'Dead-set fantastic - I think it's the fastest I've ever read a book' - Santo Cilauro, co-host of
Santo, Sam and Ed's Total Football
Originally published as
Offsider
by Melbourne University Press