Anthony Clavane

Absorbing, compelling and very personal. Brilliant

'Original, passionate, thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable'

'Compelling...Glorious...Has an appeal far beyond football'

'Engaging and ambitious - crafted from the author's own personal story, passions and obsessions'

A love song to the North, and all the contradictions and little irritations about the region that make us love it more"

Promised Land' distinguishes itself from your average football book with a framing device evoking the Exodus. This enables Clavane to elegantly and evocatively explore his own Jewishness and the influence of the Israeli diaspora on his beloved football team as well as offering a potted history of the temper and temperament of the city itself ... Clavane's vision is far from gloomy - Leeds has a knack for self-sabotage but it's eminently capable of reinvention too

This "Northern love story" has as the objects of desire both the city of Leeds and its football club. Pretty often, neither attracts much affection beyond the West Riding-but Clavane digs deep and looks hard in order to explain the forces that shaped both town and team.

Promised Land is both an anatomy of the peculiar mass psychology of Leeds United's support (shaped by the team's multiple failures in big games) and a paean to Clavane's home town, which once nurtured a thriving Jewish subculture.

A hard-edged and searingly-honest insight into why we all bother investing so much in 11 men every weekend.

A Northern Love Story

This is a book about football. It's about unconditional love for a club, even when it doesn't always seem to love you back. But it is also a book about much more than that. 
 
Anthony Clavane loves Leeds - certainly the football club, but also the city, and the tribes that make it. Now that he is an exile in the South, his frequent pilgrimages to the stadium speak for themselves. But he no less loves the rarely-glimpsed back-streets of his youth; and even has a feel for the long-gone slums where his ancestors once settled. Leeds is his promised land; idealised and unreachable, yet still it defines him. 
 
'Sports writing at its very best' Daily Telegraph

Anthony Clavane

Praise for Promised Land

Absorbing, compelling and very personal. Brilliant

'Original, passionate, thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable'

'Sports book of the year'

Absorbing, compelling and very personal. Brilliant

'Original, passionate, thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable'

'Sports book of the year'

Absorbing, compelling and very personal. Brilliant

'Original, passionate, thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable'

'Sports book of the year'

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