Believe in the Sign by Mark Hodkinson

Despite a premise that seems the very definition of niche appeal (an adolescence supporting league minnows Rochdale Football Club in the '70s, anyone?) Mark Hodkinson's page-turning recollections of growing up in the North have universal appeal by exploring what it means to pathologically follow failure. As boys romp in the streets, mentally fenced in to dustbin estates and weary of the green space outside, Believe In The Sign avoids being nostalgia-by-numbers. The murkiness of the murder of a local disabled girl and the subsequent witch-hunt of a reclusive immigrant, together with the infiltration of pie and blokes football matches by thuggish skinheads, hangs like perpetual drizzle over the cheekier recollections of trashy local paparazzi hounding managers who dinner dance with their peroxide secretaries and Hollywood coming to the Dale in the shape of 'Meet The Real Stars of The Planet of The Apes'. Despite its fairly bluntly journalistic prose (Hodkinson earned his stripes as a cub sports reporter) this is a dreamily fragmented memoir that trips from moment to moment to create a montage of a lost aesthetic; of Asda stores as portholes to a glamorous future of choice and wheezing low-rent footballers constructed from an unreformed brutish machismo. A century away from Ashley Tweedy-Cole fretting about what to blow £60k a week on.