A Natural

August 28, 2017
This slow-building novel examines the unique pressures and trappings of the hypermasculine world of professional English soccer. After being cut from the national youth team, 19-year-old Tom reluctantly signs with Town, a middling squad floundering at the bottom of its division. There, Tom still fights for playing time alongside Easter, the team’s underperforming captain, who has a bad habit of reading message boards after losses. Most of the narrative bounces back and forth between Tom and Easter’s wife, Leah, a young mother painfully alone in her marriage. The author skillfully interweaves both characters’ feelings of isolation, setting up a number of strong reveals with impressive restraint and control. Once Easter goes down with a devastating leg injury, the disintegration of his and Leah’s marriage dovetails with Tom’s burgeoning relationship. The resolution of both stories is suitably heartbreaking, but the implications resolve themselves too quickly in a rushed ending that feels out of place in a novel whose power resides in authorial deliberateness. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile sports novel with winning characters.

August 15, 2017
A closeted gay soccer player and an injured teammate's estranged wife offer an intimate picture of life in the lower reaches of professional British football.Raisin (Waterline, 2011, etc.), whose first novel, God's Own Country (2008), was shortlisted for several prizes, has twice inhabited the fictional world of the outsider and does so again with this third novel. Nineteen-year-old Tom Pearman showed promise as a Premier League junior but isn't promoted and must settle for a fourth-division team named Town. (Be not bemused, Yank reader: Raisin keeps the sport's arcana to a minimum.) Tom has a "quiet, solitary way" and remains largely apart from the other players, but he soon is drawn to the groundskeeper, Liam. Elsewhere, team captain Chris Easter sees his season collapse under a terrible leg injury that sends him moping to his home's spare room, physically and emotionally distant from his wife, Leah, and young son. Leah was already feeling isolated as a football spouse, finding it difficult to socialize with other team couples. The focus is largely on Tom and Liam's affair, which is rendered with restraint and sympathy; it's a bold theme, since not a single active British footballer has come out so far. For a while, though, it is Leah's story that seems to engage Raisin more, with its telling domestic details and an isolation for which there is no prospect of the numbing distraction in the next match. Yet neither of these parallel narratives generates much spark until a link between them and a leak to an internet fan forum stirs devastating fears in Tom and reveals the mindless prejudice and cruelty of his fellow players and fans. This is a sensitive treatment of very different kinds of solitude and pain.

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Starred review from September 15, 2017
Serious novels about gay athletes could be more rare than professionals who have come out at the peak of their careers. Here, Raisin (Waterline, 2012) introduces Tom Pearman, a talented 19-year-old English soccer player who's recently signed with a lower-division team and is grappling with his attraction to the groundskeeper, Liam Davey. Liam is friends with Leah, an unhappy young mother and wife to veteran player Chris Easter, soon injured and wrestling with demons of his own. As Tom tries to prove himself professionally, and the team rebounds from a terrible season to a strong one, Raisin depicts their world with astonishing clarity, from callow Tom's inexperience at life, to boardinghouse and team dynamics, to the agonizing slowness with which Tom and Liam recognize and own their attraction to each otheror not. Leah's and Chris' roles in the story unfold in a surprising way. The book is utterly contemporaryplayers scan online forums for gossip and cocoon themselves with electronics during long bus ridesyet the stifling pressure of the men to hide their relationship, and the locker-room and fan hazing, suggest the mid-twentieth century. (Leave it to sports to turn back the clock on social issues.) While many references and assumptions will be more familiar to British than American readers and soccer fans, Raisin's transporting and acutely observed novel speaks to us all. First-rate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2017

Tom Pearman, a 19-year-old British soccer player, gets demoted from the Premier League to lower-level competition similar to American baseball's minor leagues. Tom has plenty of time for introspection as the cartoonish coach rarely allows him onto the pitch, but we know our protagonist has natural skills. Raisin (Out Backward) writes at length about Tom's frustration with soccer, his coming-of-age feelings about sex, and the loneliness he experiences in his life outside of sports. Mirroring Tom's malaise is team captain Chris Easter, who struggles balancing his soccer responsibilities with family life, which includes a young wife and toddler son. Tom and Chris both begin to doubt their physical skills while dealing with maddening love trysts that compound their despair. Unfortunately, this novel is cluttered with excessive descriptions that bog down the story's flow. VERDICT Despite hinting at a sports tale, the focus of Raisin's story becomes his characters' inability to bring into line their love of soccer and other emotional relationships. For readers of contemporary British fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]--Rollie Welch, Lehigh Acres, FL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017

An ambitious young soccer player is stuck in a small club after being dumped by the Premier League academy, and the team captain's wife is pretty disillusioned, too. From a Granta Best of Young British Writers, whose debut, God's Own Country, was short-listed for nine literary awards.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.