Recounting a year with Batley, Hannan's aim was to evoke a venerable, small-scale sporting institution in relation to the town around it... but its appeal should extend well beyond league fans. Groundbreaking.

A compelling story... Underdogs is a fascinating account of life outside of the rugby league spotlight and gets beneath the skin of the club, town and sport in a way that's not been done before. Readers won't need to be a fan of Batley or even rugby league to enjoy this. It is a must-read.

Tremendous. I felt I was there, battling with the underdogs against the Championship's big-hitters. It's like Friday Night Lights in West Riding rather than west Texas. Underdogs is a social study of a town as much as a sports book, George Orwell meets George Williams.

A brilliant and fascinating insight into sport at a part-time level: it offers an angle rare in sports books - that of an outsider given an access-all-areas pass to the inner workings of a sporting team over the course of 12 months. And Hannan uses it superbly, providing a detailed look into the life of a modern Championship club not seen before. It's difficult to see any rugby league supporter not turning the pages as quickly as I was - and this is a book that should be enjoyed by others beyond the boundaries of the sport as well.

For a story about a small-town rugby league team, Underdogs contains multitudes. More than a great sports book, it is a gripping and witty insight into a neglected, working-class community struggling to find its place in a changing world. One of the many delights of Underdogs are the colourful characters that populate its pages... The beating heart of the story, though, is the wonderful and ridiculously under-appreciated sport of rugby league. Hannan does a magnificent job of illustrating just how much more intricate this phenomenally tough game is than initially meets the casual observer’s eye. Life-affirming... ultimately Underdogs is about the human spirit at its finest. A richly rewarding read for anyone with even a passing interest in rugby league or sport in general. It is a must-read too for anyone interested in 21st century life in a northern town.

Few sports have retained the values of honesty, hard work and pride, which underpin its history, quite like rugby league. Rarely have those values been revealed with such clarity and candour as in the pages of Underdogs, a new book by Tony Hannan which focuses on what can be achieved when a sports club is at the heart of a community... Beautifully written and infused with dry humour, there is also an energetic and important debate on why rugby league has failed to attract an Asian audience, nor aligned itself with ethnic communities in areas populated with generations of immigrants. Mostly, however, Underdogs is an exploration of enduring working class culture with its extended family and a story of what can be achieved when a band of average but committed sportsmen take guardianship of their reputations. It is rugby in the raw and essential reading for anyone with a passing interest in why sport really matters.

Fantastic... It's as if I'm in Batley as I read it.

A tremendous book.

Tremendous insight.

Excellent read.

Hannan has never been afraid to voice his opinions on the game's hierarchy or the structure of RL, and his insight along with a cheeky sense of humour makes Underdogs a compelling read.

[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.

[A] remarkable new book… A love song to light… Ann Wroe is perfectly equipped to deal with this rich mix.

A unique voice in nonfiction… Six Facets of Light exists in a world of quivering immanence.

She 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.

A wide-ranging and imaginative work of non-fiction… Never less than engaging.

Six Facets of Light is dazzlingly original.

Six 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.

A genre-crossing consideration of what light has meant to writers, painters and lovers of landscape.

Inspiring, beautifully written.

An exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.

A 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.

A book for winter.

People 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.

Wroe 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.

Ann 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”.