A Natural: A Novel - Hardcover

Raisin, Ross

 
9780525508779: A Natural: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525508775 ISBN 13: 9780525508779
Verlag: Random House, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

From dreams of soccer glory to the realities of the minor leagues, the high-stakes world of English football comes to life in this vivid coming-of-age novel for fans of Nick Hornby and The Art of Fielding.

After his unceremonious release from a Premier League academy at nineteen, Tom feels his bright future slipping away. The only contract offer he receives is from a lower-level club. Away from home for the first time, Tom struggles on and off the field, anxious to avoid the cruel pranks and hazing rituals of his teammates. Then a taboo encounter upends what little stability he has, forcing Tom to reconcile his suppressed desires with his drive to succeed.

Meanwhile, the team’s popular captain, Chris, is in denial about the state of his marriage. His wife, Leah, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held for her career. As her husband is transferred from club to club, and raising their first child practically on her own, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.

A Natural delves into the heart of a professional soccer club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body, and the struggle of conforming to the person everybody else expects you to be.

Praise for A Natural

“This is a bold novel. [Raisin has a] deep and unwavering empathy for others, and an ability to find flashes of beauty in life’s unforgiving ugliness. His language might be spare, but his turn of phrase is strikingly elegant. . . .  The way is lit by his keen perceptions; the novel suggests the frustrations that arise when lived experience fails to align with what was imagined, and analyzes the gap between spectatorship and participation. . . . If Raisin has chosen to focus on that which stifles rather than frees us, he has done so to demonstrate precisely why we need all the things that society and circumstance suppress. . . . The confidence and skill with which he pursues his vision is not just persuasive, it’s powerful.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Raisin’s transporting and acutely observed novel speaks to us all. First-rate.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
“An intimate picture of life in the lower reaches of professional British football . . . a bold theme . . . is rendered with restraint and sympathy. . . . [A Natural] is a sensitive treatment of very different kinds of solitude and pain.”—Kirkus Reviews

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ross Raisin was born in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God’s Own Country, published in 2008, was shortlisted for nine literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. In 2009, Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. In 2013, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Ross Raisin lives in London.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

A few drivers had slowed to look up at the side of the coach as it circled the roundabout. Along one stretch of its window, near the back, three pairs of white buttocks were pressed to the glass like a row of supermarket chicken breasts. A car came past and the driver sounded his horn. The next driver repeated the action. When the coach lurched off the roundabout one of the pairs of buttocks momentarily disappeared, before returning emphatically to its place alongside the others.

Tom sat alone beside his kitbag, looking across the aisle at the hysterical gurning faces of the three mooners. The middle one had dropped his trousers to his ankles, his cock bobbing stupidly with the motion of the vehicle as it overtook a caravan onto the dual carriageway. Tom turned away, glad that the short journey was nearly over.

They were on their way to a hotel away from the town center—­ a preseason policy enforced by the chairman in the aftermath of one eventful weekend the previous summer. Tom had not been at the club then, although he had heard the story. He’d arrived less than two months ago, shortly after being let go by his boyhood club at a brief and tearful meeting with the new manager. The memory of that afternoon was still difficult for him to think about. All of the second-­year scholars lining up in the corridor among the new man’s cardboard boxes and whiteboards. The office and its stale stink of the old gaffer’s cigarettes. The sight of the new manager behind the desk, calling for him to take a seat.

“You’re a good lad, from what I hear. Your parents should be proud of you. You’re going to be some player, when you grow into yourself. I’ve got no doubt that you’ll find another club.”

Tom found out afterwards that he’d spoken exactly the same words to all of them, except for the two he had awarded first-­team contracts to. Thirteen lads who had progressed through each of the youth levels with Tom, all hoping now for another club to phone them while they thumbed the jobs pages or took on work from recruitment agencies, shopping centers, the multiplex, all waiting to grow into themselves. Unlike most of them, though, Tom did get approached. A small club down south. His agent called him one morning to say that their chairman had organized a hotel for the night so that he could come down and talk to them with a view to a one-­year contract.

“Who?” his sister asked when he told his family. “What are they, non-­league?”

“No, they just got promoted from the Conference. My agent says they’ve got money behind them.” He looked away, not wanting to see her reaction, and clocked his dad already at the computer, peering, slowly nodding at the screen.

The three backsides returned to their seats, laughing. The middle one, scanning around to see if anybody was still watching them, caught Tom’s eye, and Tom gave him a dumb grin before turning to the window. Cars moved past them in the other lane. Out of some, the blue and white scarf of that afternoon’s opposition flapped and spanked against rear windows. Inside a camper van, two young children were sticking their tongues out at him.

The match had begun promisingly. It was Tom’s first start of the preseason friendlies, and the sick cramping tension of the dressing room had left him the moment play started. During one early scrappy passage the ball spilled out to him on the wing and he ran automatically at the fullback who, stumbling, tripping, ballooned the ball away over their falling bodies for a corner. Adrenaline carried Tom towards the flag to demand the ball from the tiny ballboy. For the first time since he had left home he was liberated from thought, absorbed in the match. He struck the corner cleanly, and from the wrestling mass of the penalty area somebody headed the ball against the crossbar. In that instant Tom felt something inside him let go, an excitement, a lust, that left him almost dizzy as he turned and jogged back into position.

After that, though, most of the play switched to the other end of the pitch. A bungle between the central defenders, Boyn and Daish—­who were sitting now on the seats in front of Tom watching a game show on a laptop—­resulted in a goal for the home side. Confidence sank from the team. They lost 3–­1. In the miserable sweaty fug of the dressing room afterwards Clarke, the manager, told them that they were a bunch of soft fucking fairies. When one of the younger players giggled, the manager stepped forward and kicked him in the leg.

The coach left the dual carriageway and joined the heavy traffic moving down a superstore-­lined arterial road. By a set of traffic lights a group of home supporters stood on the pavement outside a pub, smoking. One of them noticed the coach and gawped at it for a moment until they all understood what was next to them and started into a frenzy of hand gestures. In front of Tom a few players turned to look at the group, but he pretended not to see them. At his old club even the reserve team coach had tinted windows. Now, outside the top flight, the supporters were an actual presence. They came up to him in the street and at the supermarket. Inside Town’s small, tight, windswept ground, where they stood in little grimacing clusters along the terracing, he could already identify individual voices and faces amid them. The lights changed. He gave a final glance at the group, now rhythmically fist-­pumping in an ecstasy of abuse as the coach pulled away in the direction of the hotel.

He was rooming with Chris Easter, the captain—­a situation that Easter seemed none too happy about as he dumped his bag on the bed by the window, turned on the television, then pounded at the windowpane for a couple of minutes before eventually accepting that it was not designed to open. He remained beside it for some time, staring out at the flat-­roofed view of a neighboring retail park, occasionally giving a small shake of his head.

Easter, Michael Yates and Frank Foley, the goalkeeper, were no longer allowed to room with one another, in any combination, and had all been paired with younger or newer members of the squad. Despite this, Clarke did not seem to have a problem with the three keeping company if there was a night out after one of the friendlies. They sat together that evening in the first of a convoy of people carriers, and they formed a small boisterous circle with a few of the other senior players by the bar of the first place the squad went into while everybody else piled into a large sticky red booth near the toilets.

There was nowhere left to sit when Tom got to the booth, so he stood behind the curved banquette alongside the other young players, most of whom had come through the youth team and stuck together, smiling and straining to hear above the music what was being said. Sitting immediately below him the right back, Marc Fleming, was telling a story. Tom could not hear a word of it. He kept his eyes on the top of Fleming’s head, trying, in case anybody should look up at him, to appear coolly amused. The raw greased scalp shone through Fleming’s hair. Whatever it was that he was saying, the seated players were gripped by it. At the end of the story Fleming bent forward and slapped both his palms onto the table. A wave of laughter coursed around the booth and Fleming pushed back, obviously unaware of Tom standing right behind him because his head bumped Tom’s stomach and he twisted to look up.

“Christ, Tommy, that’s the closest any of our balls has got to each other all day, that is.”

In that moment Tom felt so grateful that he was almost moved to put his hand on Fleming’s shoulder and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525508775
ISBN 13 
9780525508779
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9
Plovdiv
Bulgarien

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781784702786: A Natural

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1784702781 ISBN 13:  9781784702786
Verlag: Vintage, 2018
Softcover