It is Boxing Day 1962. A frozen pitch at Roker Park and the painful premature end to a career as one of footballs most deadly marksmen. At twenty-eight he made 251 league goals in 274 appearances. For Sunderland and Middlesbrough. How is a man to make a living? How is a man to live? It is Yorkshire 1974. Leeds United hate Brian Clough. Brian Clough hates Leeds United. Leeds United the League Champions. Leeds United the countrys most reviled club. Dirty Leeds Leeds Leeds. But Brian Clough has just been appointed the manager of Leeds United. Now Cloughie is on his way to work ...David Peaces extraordinarily inventive novel shifts between and across the twelve years and forty-four days in the life of a football genius to tell the story of a world characterized by a fear of failure and a hunger for success. A portrait of one of the most idiosyncratic and wilfully perverse Englishmen of the past century and a story of the power and the paranoia that come together to shape people and their times The Damned Utd is the compelling new novel by one of our most praised young writers.
