Answered Prayers
On sale
31st August 2023
Price: £24.99
Written by our greatest sportswriter, three time winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, Duncan Hamilton.
Answered Prayers is a definitive history of the most famous event in British sporting, the triumph of the 1966 England world cup football team and the disastrous effect that victory had on the game.
PRAISE FOR DUNCAN HAMILTON
‘Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game’ Guardian
‘A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away’ Independent
‘Justifiably prize-winning’ Mail on Sunday
(P) 2023 Quercus Editions Limited
Answered Prayers is a definitive history of the most famous event in British sporting, the triumph of the 1966 England world cup football team and the disastrous effect that victory had on the game.
PRAISE FOR DUNCAN HAMILTON
‘Hamilton has a perceptively humane understanding of men for whom football was never just a game’ Guardian
‘A marriage of prose and detail so fine and fastidious that it takes the breath away’ Independent
‘Justifiably prize-winning’ Mail on Sunday
(P) 2023 Quercus Editions Limited
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Reviews
Terrific. As good on post-war Britain as Peter Hennessy. Informed and heart-breaking.
An expert observer of different forms of Englishness, he treats sportspeople as three-dimensional humans.
Absorbing. Like all the best football books, Answered Prayers is not just about football; it's about hope and despair, friendship and enmity, and the character it takes to handle them.
Magnificent, moving, often funny and deeply researched account . . . Is this just a book for those who know football? Far from it: this is a story of glory and the impermanence of fame.
Like Alf Ramsey's 1966 team, this book has depth, it has riches and it's a winner - the finest piece of sports writing I have read in ages and a superb piece of contemporary history. Duncan Hamilton's great gift is the blending of character, mood and moment. Even Ramsey might have showed a spasm of emotion were he here to read it.
This may well be one of the best books ever written about football.
Brilliant...Hamilton, arguably Britain's greatest sportswriter, tells [Ramsey's] tale with his wonderful panache. He is the master of the vivid phrase... Dry humour is never far from the surface in this book's pages.
Hamilton has a gift for treating sportspeople as humans
A highly poignant, history of England's World Cup victory in 1966.
The finest sports book of the year by one of the country's most garlanded sports writers.
Who would have thought a new book about a sporting event of the distant past would be as enlightening and relevant as Hamilton's Answered Prayers.