Author:Thomas Dekker,David Doherty
'I have success, money, women. I've been lionised by the public and the media. The world is at my feet. I've spread my wings and here I am, soaring above everything and everyone. But in reality, the descent has already begun.'
Thomas Dekker was set to become one of pro cycling’s superstars. But before long, he found himself sucked in by the lure of hedonistic highs and troubled by the intense pressure to perform.
In The Descent, Dekker tells his story of hotel room blood bags, shady rendezvous with drug dealers and late-night partying at the Tour de France. This is Dekker’s journey from youthful idealism to a sordid path of excess and doping that lays bare cycling’s darkest secrets like never before.
An extraordinary autobiography… Dekker luridly details how he embraced the dark side
—— i NewspaperPolitically charged, and flashing between scenes of gallows humour and improbable sporting achievement, Two Tribes is an uncompromising portrayal. Tony Evans brilliantly captures a city under fire through its rival footballers.
—— Simon Hughes, author of Ring of Fire and Men in White SuitsHighly recommended– not just on Merseyside, but for all who remember that season fondly and for those who wish to recall or understand an era when English football and society existed on a knife-edge.
—— Oliver Kay , The TimesTony Evans is a brilliant writer who knows these teams, this subject, this era, this culture, these themes and this city better than anybody, and this enthralling book makes that so clear.
—— Miguel Delaney , IndependentThatcher, tumult, tunes. This is more than just a football book.
—— Michael Calvin , Sunday TimesA great read. As a Liverpool fan there is obvious interest. But to me the book goes a lot deeper than that, covering Liverpool City’s political climate in the ‘80s, the growth of football television coverage, etc. Lots of fun.
—— Marco Giocomelli , Evening StandardNot just a funny and forensic account of the year the city of Liverpool was the undisputed capital of British football, but a proud and unapologetic tribute to how that city stood up, in all its radical beauty, to a brutal Thatcherite pounding. Two Tribes is social history of football writing at its finest.
—— Brian Reade , Daily Mirror‘Two Tribes perfectly illustrates the relationship between football and society in Thatcher’s Britain with as many twists and turns off the pitch as on it…The sheer beauty of this book is its ability to take you from the stinking alleyways and crumbling terraces that were the norm for football supporters at that time to London’s West End or the drinking dens of the North West quicker than a Pat Nevin pirouette thanks to the author’s uncanny ability to depict the city he lived in and the game that he and so many like him followed religiously across a country that was on a knife edge… Two Tribes is not a Liverpool book. It’s not an Everton book either. It’s a snapshot of a time when watching football was often a matter of survival, a social history of a highly charged political tinderbox of a city which was in danger of tearing itself apart; interspersed with anecdotes of the time which were as relevant in Middlesbrough and Manchester as they were on Merseyside. And that’s what makes it so good.’
—— Matthew Crist , The SportsmanA coruscating snapshot of football and life on Merseyside during Thatcher’s Britain.
—— The Observer - Best Sports Books of 2018Wroe has become a daredevil writer… Light of myriad types may blaze in the mind’s eye of the reader…elegantly produced, lightly illustrated volume… Wroe’s style here is rhapsodic and meditative.
—— Stoddard Martin , Literary ReviewA passionate and meandering love letter to a natural phenomenon… Six Facets of Light reads as if you are in Wroe's mind, listening to her mosey from her own astute observations to celebrations of light by famous names. The pace of the narrative is just like going on a long, rambling walk on the South Downs Way in summer, making it a book best enjoyed at your leisure in the great outdoors.
—— Mary Ann Pickford , Irish News[A] remarkable new book… Felicities of phrasing and cadence on every page…each of the six chapters offers something of the taut coherence and closeness of the structure of musical variation.
—— Peter Davidson , Tablet[A] remarkable new book… A love song to light… Ann Wroe is perfectly equipped to deal with this rich mix.
—— Piers Plowright , Camden ReviewA unique voice in nonfiction… Six Facets of Light exists in a world of quivering immanence.
—— Kathryn Hughes , GuardianShe switches from thoughts about an English lane to Coleridge, Thoreau, Samuel Palmer, larks, ragwort and Ravilious’s taste in poetry, in effortless and beguiling succession.
—— Royal AcademyA wide-ranging and imaginative work of non-fiction… Never less than engaging.
—— Erica Wagner , New StatesmanSix Facets of Light is dazzlingly original.
—— Lucy Hughes-Hallett , GuardianSix Facets of Light is a book that is making me look and think more closely, and closer again. In its own way this feels like a hymn of praise, a thanksgiving and a celebration of something replete with mystery… Slowly the shackles of modern scientific thought and progress and theory slip away and I find myself observing light as if I have only just realised it existed. How clever a book has to be to achieve that.
—— Dove Grey ReaderA genre-crossing consideration of what light has meant to writers, painters and lovers of landscape.
—— OldieInspiring, beautifully written.
—— Sunday TimesAn exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.
—— Daily TelegraphA wonderful literary meditation… This book is suffused with vivid personal memory and precise, delicate observation of Nature. Wroe’s feeling for landscape is both sensitive and acute; her style is lyrical and precise.
—— Hugo Davenport , Resurgence and EcologistA book for winter.
—— Honor Clerk , Spectator, Books of the YearPeople of faith talk a great deal about light, and we would do well to learn more about it from Wroe’s quick-eyed love of it.
—— Mark Oakley , Church TimesWroe passes her elusive subject, light itself, through the prism of her dazzlingly well-read mind, and the resulting rainbows fairly dance across the page… An utterly original book that will leave you, in every sense of the word, enlightened.
—— Claire Lowdon , Sunday Times, Book of the YearAnn Wroe’s Six Facets of Light is a fascinating and original meditation [on light]. Six Facets of Light is an exquisite collage of relations, a prose poem to “what escaped” absolutely everyone – and to how madly, brilliantly, they tried to “be in step”.
—— Joanna Kavenna , Times Literary Supplement
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