It is Boxing Day, 1962. A frozen pitch at Roker Park and the painful premature end to a career as one of football"s most deadly marksmen. At twenty-eight, he made 251 league goals in 274 appearances. For Sunderland and Middlesbrough. How is a man to make a living? How is a man to live? It is Yorkshire, 1974. Leeds United hate Brian Clough. Brian Clough hates Leeds United. Leeds United, the League Champions. Leeds United, the country"s most reviled club. Dirty Leeds, Leeds, Leeds. But Brian Clough has just been appointed the manager of Leeds United. Now Cloughie is on his way to work ...David Peace"s extraordinarily inventive novel shifts between and across the twelve years and forty-four days in the life of a football genius to tell the story of a world characterized by a fear of failure and a hunger for success. A portrait of one of the most idiosyncratic and wilfully perverse Englishmen of the past century, and a story of the power and the paranoia that come together to shape people and their times, "The Damned Utd" is the compelling new novel by one of our most praised young writers.