A Natural

Tom has always known exactly the person he is going to be. A successful footballer. A man others look up to. Now, though, the bright future he imagined for himself is threatened.

The Premier League academy of his boyhood has let him go. At nineteen, Tom finds himself playing for a tiny club in a town he has never heard of. But as he navigates his isolation and his desperate need for recognition, a sudden and thrilling encounter offers him the promise of an escape, and Tom is forced to question whether he can reconcile his supressed desires with his dreams of success.

Leah, the captain's wife, has almost forgotten the dreams she once held, for her career, her marriage. Moving again, as her husband is transferred from club to club, she is lost, disillusioned with where life has taken her.

A Natural delves into the heart of a professional football club: the pressure, the loneliness, the threat of scandal, the fragility of the body and the struggle, on and off the pitch, with conforming to the person that everybody else expects you to be.

'The pantheon of top-class soccer novelists has never been large, but with A Natural Ross Raisin can immediately be ushered into the Premier League executive box' TLS

Ross Raisin's first novel, God's Own Country, was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for nine literary awards, including the Guardian First Book Award. In 2009 he was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2013 he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London.