Iron Towns

The Iron Towns: once the furnace heart of industrial England, before that farmed and toiled over, before that green and deep-forested, a place of folk legends. Now the old docks and cranes and steelworks are rusting away, and the town's once great football club with them...Liam Corwen grew up here, and is playing out his career at Irontowns FC. The club's history rests on his shoulders; in some ways, the history of football itself does too, tattoos of the game's greatest players etched all over Liam's body. But it is his own past that drags him down. Twenty years ago he and his friends had life stretching ahead of them: dreams of stardom, young marriages, money in their pockets. Twenty years ago two devastating events halted their youth abruptly; now they must finally face up to the past...Iron Towns tells the story of Liam, his friends and his generation, and their place in an old, forgotten England. But it is also a sweeping, magisterial novel about the dreams of youth and industrial progress, from Bilbao to Eindhoven and Buenos Aires to Milan - and what happens when those dreams recede into the past.