Iron Towns - Softcover

Anthony Cartwright was born in Dudley in 1973. His first novel The Afterglow won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for several other literary prizes; his second novel Heartland was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was adapted for BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime; his third novel How I Killed Margaret Thatcher was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and was a Fiction Uncovered 2013 selection. He worked as an English teacher in schools in London and the Midlands for over ten years and is currently a First Story writer-in-residence at two schools. He lives in London with his wife and son.

A powerful lament for England's diminished regions ... visionary * Guardian * A gritty, moving elegy for an abandoned, once-thriving section of society, and the best football novel since The Damned United * Daily Mail * An elegiac tale that mixes myth and melodrama to dazzling effect. * Metro * A first-class sports novel ... endows football with a mythic status * Mail on Sunday * Iron Towns is one of those rare things - a book that lives up to its ambitions, and those ambitions are big. It's a dense but tender portrait of a world that few bother to notice, much less write books about. I loved the layering of the mythic and the prosaic, the intimate and the broad. An impressive and distinctive novel -- Catherine O'Flynn A writer with a wonderful ear ... and an unblinking sense of Britain as it is today. Anthony Cartwright's patient, attentive storytelling shines a glowing light on areas of our common experience that the English novel usually consigns to darkness -- Jonathan Coe Praise for Heartland: This is what fiction should be and what readers want it to be: passionately engaged. The ambition and achievement shine forth from every sentence -- David Peace A talented and thoughtful writer -- Carol Birch An impressive novel, glimpsed through the prism of a pair of football matches -- DJ Taylor