A gripping account of how football captured a nation

A breezy, readable and nuanced primer to the centrality of football to Brazilian life

Compelling, lucidly written, and furnished with detail to spare

Futebol Nation isn't really about sport - it's a pimples-and-all portrait of the world's sixth
largest country and the many ways it has succeeded in shooting itself in both feet

Brilliant... The stories of the lanternes rouges that Leonard picks out have real value, because the race's rear view can tell you much more than the angle we're all familiar with

Makes for oddly inspiring reading. There is an art to losing

An elegant book... Surprising and illuminating

This is a valuable book with some great stories. Deeply-researched and well-written, it’s an enjoyable read that shouldn’t be rushed

Fascinating… Without losers, there are no winners

Thoughtful, witty

In this lively, rear-view account of largely unsung heroes, and a few villains, Leonard has managed the difficult feat of coming up with an original angle on Le Tour

Leonard extracts the dignity that sometimes exists in sporting failure; this is not the world of Armstrong, Keane or Pietersen and all the more appealing because of that

Celebratory and hilarious in equal measures, The Last Man revels in the travails of the underdog

This book does a great job of revealing some of the less well known stories from le Tour: well written, entertaining, and informative

This book is an entertaining account taking in everyone from stage winners and former yellow jerseys who couldn’t hang on, to a breakaway leader who stopped for a bottle of wine and then took a wrong turn, to a doper whose drug cocktail backfired

We know the winners of the Tour de France, but Lanterne Rouge tells the forgotten, often inspirational and occasionally absurd stories of the last-placed rider