Gordon Burn - Best and Edwards - Fri 20 Oct
BEST AND EDWARDS
Football, Fame and Oblivion
Gordon Burn
5 October 2006, £16.99 hardback
‘Every manager goes through life looking for one great player praying he’ll find one. Just one. I was more lucky than most. I found two – Big Duncan and George. I suppose in their own ways, they both died, didn’t they?’ Sir Matt Busby
By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club in 1953, aged fifteen. Two years later he won his first England cap and became the most prized of the ‘Busby Babes’. Then in February 1958 came Munich.Half a decade later George Best represented the reborn United. ‘Georgie’ of the boutiques and dolly birds; ‘El Beatle’ of the European Cup and European Player of the Year in 1968; in the opinion of Pelé, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. But by the age of twenty-seven he was retired from the game and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial.
Much more than a portrait of two of football’s greatest legends, Best and Edwards is a brilliant and highly readable exploration into the culture of celebrity and how that shaped the careers of two very different personalities.
Duncan Edwards would have been 70 on 1 October 2006 and November will mark the first anniversary of George Best’s death. Bobby Charlton, who also features in the book, will be 69 on 6 October.
Gordon is available for interview and to write pieces. For any further information, please contact Anna Pallai on 020 7465 7556 (anna.pallai@faber.co.uk) or Kate Burton on 020 7465 7554 (kate.burton@faber.co.uk)
Gordon Burn is the author of three acclaimed novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove and The North of England Home Service. He is also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody's Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers and On The Way to Work. He lives in London.
Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984)
‘A book which will, with some justice, be compared to In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. It’s as if Thomas Hardy were also present at the writing of this account of the Yorkshire Ripper.’ Norman Mailer
Pocket Money (1984)
‘(A) seminal book about the baize.’ Scotsman
Alma Cogan (1991)
‘a work of extraordinary daring … Burn’s amazing feat of appropriation strikes home in an era engaged in whole hearted celebrity worship.’ The Times
‘Burn’s novel, vividly and economically written, is a sombre reflection on fame and its cost; it is also a bitterly disenchanted view of how Britain has developed over the past 40 years.’ Sunday Times
Fullalove (1995)
‘Fullalove is a thoroughgoing horror story. Yet paradoxically, it is in the midst of all these horrors that Burn touches most authentically on life.’ Guardian
‘Gordon Burn’s book is like a fabulous extension, a physical creation, from our increasing sense of unease about modern, media-saturated, especially urban life.’ Scotsman
Happy Like Murderers (1998)
‘One of the finest pieces of writing by a living English writer, the cold blank prose and the use of repetition (again) eventually numbing the reader into a peculiar state of understanding.’ Rod Liddle, The Times
‘Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers is, on the other hand, a highly sophisticated literary construct ... It will be seen at once that this is powerful writing. Burn’s approach has given him some real intuition into the world the Wests inhabited, physically, socially and psychologically.’ David Sexton, Evening Standard
The North of England Home Service (2003)
‘The history he presents, using a mixture of actual and the imagined, and at times wielding an Orwellian eloquence, is worth the price of the book itself ... The real impetus is retrospective, which leaves the here and now belated and beside the point.’ Sean O'Brien, Independent
Football, Fame and Oblivion
Gordon Burn
5 October 2006, £16.99 hardback
‘Every manager goes through life looking for one great player praying he’ll find one. Just one. I was more lucky than most. I found two – Big Duncan and George. I suppose in their own ways, they both died, didn’t they?’ Sir Matt Busby
By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club in 1953, aged fifteen. Two years later he won his first England cap and became the most prized of the ‘Busby Babes’. Then in February 1958 came Munich.Half a decade later George Best represented the reborn United. ‘Georgie’ of the boutiques and dolly birds; ‘El Beatle’ of the European Cup and European Player of the Year in 1968; in the opinion of Pelé, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. But by the age of twenty-seven he was retired from the game and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial.
Much more than a portrait of two of football’s greatest legends, Best and Edwards is a brilliant and highly readable exploration into the culture of celebrity and how that shaped the careers of two very different personalities.
Duncan Edwards would have been 70 on 1 October 2006 and November will mark the first anniversary of George Best’s death. Bobby Charlton, who also features in the book, will be 69 on 6 October.
Gordon is available for interview and to write pieces. For any further information, please contact Anna Pallai on 020 7465 7556 (anna.pallai@faber.co.uk) or Kate Burton on 020 7465 7554 (kate.burton@faber.co.uk)
Gordon Burn is the author of three acclaimed novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove and The North of England Home Service. He is also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody’s Husband, Somebody's Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers and On The Way to Work. He lives in London.
Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984)
‘A book which will, with some justice, be compared to In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. It’s as if Thomas Hardy were also present at the writing of this account of the Yorkshire Ripper.’ Norman Mailer
Pocket Money (1984)
‘(A) seminal book about the baize.’ Scotsman
Alma Cogan (1991)
‘a work of extraordinary daring … Burn’s amazing feat of appropriation strikes home in an era engaged in whole hearted celebrity worship.’ The Times
‘Burn’s novel, vividly and economically written, is a sombre reflection on fame and its cost; it is also a bitterly disenchanted view of how Britain has developed over the past 40 years.’ Sunday Times
Fullalove (1995)
‘Fullalove is a thoroughgoing horror story. Yet paradoxically, it is in the midst of all these horrors that Burn touches most authentically on life.’ Guardian
‘Gordon Burn’s book is like a fabulous extension, a physical creation, from our increasing sense of unease about modern, media-saturated, especially urban life.’ Scotsman
Happy Like Murderers (1998)
‘One of the finest pieces of writing by a living English writer, the cold blank prose and the use of repetition (again) eventually numbing the reader into a peculiar state of understanding.’ Rod Liddle, The Times
‘Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers is, on the other hand, a highly sophisticated literary construct ... It will be seen at once that this is powerful writing. Burn’s approach has given him some real intuition into the world the Wests inhabited, physically, socially and psychologically.’ David Sexton, Evening Standard
The North of England Home Service (2003)
‘The history he presents, using a mixture of actual and the imagined, and at times wielding an Orwellian eloquence, is worth the price of the book itself ... The real impetus is retrospective, which leaves the here and now belated and beside the point.’ Sean O'Brien, Independent
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