I loved this; sad, funny, believable, great characters and plot...

Having loved Ross Rasin's other books, I'd been looking forward to this for a while, and it didn't disappoint. I was apprehensive that I might not be the target audience, but I was engaged from the get-go and pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. A testament to Raisin's writing!

This is fantastic , a book to hand to friends who dont think football works in literature.

Good characterisation , well plotted and gives a sense that we are inhabiting a very specialized world .

Recommended without reservation

This novel is all about football. Wait, my bookish friends, come back! It also examines weighty themes: identity, masculinity, the journey from adolescence into adulthood. Most importantly, it explores what can happen when the worlds of sport and sexuality collide.

Tom Pearman is a 19-year-old footballer who has just been released from his contract with an English Premier League club. With no other options available, he signs a year long deal with Town, a League Two outfit. This is a different planet from the glamour of the top division: small crowds, ramshackle grounds, bumpy pitches. Once a hot prospect for England Under-18s, he will have to prove himself all over again with a team that is struggling for its own survival. His talent is not in question but Tom has a deep secret burning inside of him, something he feels he must suppress in order to make it in the game. What follows is an eventful season in this young man's career, in which he will have to battle the demons of self-doubt and shame in order to survive a ruthless, unforgiving sport.

Tom is a shy and sensitive soul. His introverted nature makes him an outsider in the bawdy environment of the dressing room. Though he does his best to take part in the squad's antics and pranks, he spends much of his free time by himself, going for long drives around the coast and aimless walks on the beach. He is still learning how to become a man, living in digs with a local family who cook his meals for him. He doesn't need his sexuality to complicate his situation even further, yet he cannot deny his urges, "the things which he blocked out over and over that he knew he wanted to do again." After a passionate tryst with Liam Davey, the club groundsman, he slowly allows himself to fall in love. But both men realise that the relationship must stay hidden. Who knows what might happen if the fans and the media discovered this illicit affair?

It's hard to believe in this day and age but homosexuality is still a taboo topic in professional football. By the law of averages several gay players must exist but only a handful have ever been brave enough to come out. By placing himself inside the head of one such sportsman, Ross Raisin imagines the nightmare they might go through - the abuse from the stands and the opposition, even from their fellow team-mates. Not to mention the horror their own families would endure after hearing these sickening chants. Is it any wonder they stay in the closet instead of subjecting themselves to this torture?

Much of the novel is given over to Chris Easter, the club captain. Though he is a selfish individual with a high opinion of himself, he is also plagued with self-doubt, spending hours on the Town website forum, poring over the fans' thoughts on his performances. His wife Leah is a close confidante of Tom's boyfriend, though Chris seems to have a problem with Liam. They played in the same youth team years ago but don't speak nowadays, and we eventually learn why.

Therein lies one of the main issues with A Natural - it is low on surprises. Once we uncover the simmering resentments at play in the story, it is quite easy to predict what will happen next. What did impress me about this book is its authentic depiction of life in the lower divisions. Being a long-suffering Leeds United supporter myself, I know the pain of following an unfashionable team away from the glitz of the Premier League. It's tough to get excited about a midweek game in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy and Raisin captures this humdrum fandom brilliantly. But what sets this novel apart is its compassionate exploration of such a delicate subject. A Natural displays a dignified awareness and a thoughtful understanding of the tribulations that gay players go through, and for that alone it deserves major praise.

Tom is a talented young footballer who has always seemed destined for stardom. He's spent years training with a local Premier League club, with the implicit assumption they would ultimately sign him. But that doesn't happen, and instead, Tom moves hundreds of miles away from his family home to join a League Two team only ever referred to as 'Town'. He is quiet and private – a natural player but, perhaps, an unnatural footballer. Raisin's penchant for the bleak lends itself perfectly to the world of third-division football, a strange halfway house between Premier League glamour and the muddy drudgery of local leagues; a world where teenage boys can earn more money than their parents ever have, but still be living out of Holiday Inn hotel rooms and getting takeaway from the local chippy every night.

However, that is not the whole story. A Natural is certainly a narrative of growing up, becoming an adult, surviving alone, but it is also a narrative of sexual awakening and repression. Tom is gay, though at the start of the novel he has buried that knowledge deep. It isn't immediately apparent that his sexuality differs from the other players' – only that the laddish way they perform sexuality, pulling paralytic girls in clubs and getting blowjobs from strippers in front of their teammates, makes him uncomfortable. Later, when Tom begins to sense a (reciprocated) attraction to Town's groundsman, Liam, internalised homophobia is conveyed through language and draws you into the character's disgust at himself. When Tom and Liam first kiss, the description is unpleasant: Tom experiences spasms of revulsion and a fleeting desire to hurt Liam; he momentarily feels 'certain that he was about to be sick into the man's warm stinking mouth'.

Tom and Liam do embark on a sort of relationship, but it is stunted by Tom's paranoia and discomfort. Running in parallel with this is the story of Chris Easter, once the golden boy of Town, whose star is fading; and his wife Leah, as lonely and isolated as Tom in her own way and, incongruously, Liam's best friend. Their fates slowly interweave, building to an undeniably contrived climax that's probably the weakest thing about the book. Throughout, A Natural eschews the dialect-led style of Raisin's previous novels in favour of calm, plain, straightforwardly descriptive prose. It would be workmanlike if it didn't flow so smoothly.

Let me get all millennial-hot-take on you for a second: as many critics have noted, Raisin's novels are about men and masculinity, but I see them as feminist. With A Natural, it struck me that he writes about how traditional notions of masculinity, patriarchal norms, and – in this case – heteronormativity all fail men who, for whatever reason, don't conform. With Sam, the protagonist of God's Own Country, we see how one stereotype becomes another: how the bullied, awkward outcast turns becomes the creep, the stalker, the rapist; how emotion is pushed down and turned inward until it becomes a twisted and deformed thing. In Waterline, Mick is the proud tradesman whose skills have become redundant, and whose pride and stoicism lead him to bottle up his grief and reject help until there is nowhere to go but down.

Compared to Raisin's previous leading men, Tom gets a relatively upbeat ending. There's a brutal sort of happiness about the final lines. But does his success come at a cost? I watched Moonlight a few days after I finished A Natural, and couldn't help drawing parallels between the film's protagonist, Chiron, and Tom, imagining a similarly stifled adulthood for the latter. The scenes of Tom and Liam's holiday in Portugal – the only time Tom allows himself to actually be himself – are difficult to forget: glimpses of genuine joy amid the sadness, shame and denial.

A Natural interrogates our ideas of what it means to 'be a man'. How far have we really come with acceptance of that which is perceived as 'other' – especially in a closed world like that of football, wherein a traditional notion of masculinity is central to the identity of the sport itself. Tom's story is quietly brutal in its examination of the damaging limits of such ideas, and unflinching in its depiction of the consequences for individuals. It feels damning but also intimate: a point is made, but the characters are far more than mere pawns.

This is one of those books which I find hard to review. I will only share my thoughts about this book and you can read the synopsis of the book above.

The plot of the book is what interested me the most and made me want to read this book - keep in mind I'm not a football fan but an exploration of one's sexuality in an environment where it's a definite taboo and not talked about is what sounds very interesting. Onto my thoughts, the books premise was good but I found it to be lacking something.. the first half of the book was rather dry in my opinion and it made me skim but once you get past that point it gets more interesting and makes you want to keep reading it. The characters were fine and I found some to be annoying because there was no need for them to be in this book. It was an okay book considering it was written by a male who has no experience in this subject (except for football). I also think that the author did a good job by bringing this kind of book into the world and giving a voice to other footballers who feel this way.
This may not be everyone's cup of tea but it was an OK read which anyone interested in reading it should go do it (I'd recommend reading it as an ebook because it's cheaper).

I would like to thank the publisher (Random House UK, Vintage Publishing) and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book.

A Natural is the story of a football dressing room. It's a lower league dressing room (specifically League 2, aka The Fourth Division). This is the bottom rung of professional football - below it is a land of semi-professionals, tradies by day and footballers at the weekend. The dressing room is populated by jaded old pros who have tried, and mostly failed, at higher league clubs; young kids torn between ambition and hope on the one hand and the trapdoor to non-league on the other; and just occasionally, the rare man who is comfortable being a hero in a small town. For all of them, there is the spectre of their contract end date and the question of whether it will be renewed.

Specifically, the story focuses on four characters: Tom Pearman, a young footballer who was released at the end of his scholarship with his home town club; Chris Easter, the club captain; Leah, Easter's wife; and Liam Davey, the groundsman. Each has their own demons; none terribly happy with their lives. Yet despite this, the public demand for a "club" in which everyone is matey, blokey and carefree pervades everything. There is horseplay, drinking, clubbing and banter.

We see the reality, though. A precarious career, depending so often on the last performance and the last mistake. Lives are controlled by coaches who dole out free time, permission to have a drink; set bedtimes; and humiliate those who don't fit in. Footballers spending their lives on the road; ploughing up motorways between their home town, club town, away games and just driving round to get headspace away from their teammates. They live in guesthouses, hotels, temporary rentals. They have no stable friendships, no time to put down roots. At he whim of the coach, they can be living in another city with barely a couple of days' notice, playing for a different team, being idolised by a different set of supporters.

So what happens if one of the players is gay? There has only ever been one openly gay professional footballer in England (Justin Fashanu) and he ended up taking his own life. Homophobia is rife in football and is tolerated when turned on both one's opponents and one's own team. Managers have gone on record to say that it could never be acceptable to have a gay player in the team; players have taunted one another when they don't fit the laddish stereotype. Everywhere in British society, we have had gay people breaking down the barriers and claiming their part in the world: ay rock stars; gay TV presenters; gay MPs, gay clergy; gay CEOs; gay police. But no gay footballers. And as A Natural demonstrates, football is a hermetically sealed world in which participants have been immersed since early teens. The managers and coaches have never been in the real world; the journalists have either come from the same world or are in awe of it. There is no place to challenge these preconceptions. Indeed, there were even still hints of racial prejudice on display in A Natural to an extend that would see such people drummed out of any other corporation in disgrace. A Natural was a sad indictment of the forced social compliance of the football world.

But sadly, the novel did not feel quite equal to the ideas. The split focus between the four main characters felt a bit choppy and uneven. Whilst Tom seemed well-drawn and fully realised, I never quite believed in Chris and Leah Easter, and especially not in Liam Davey. They did not seem to have sufficient depth or history; their actions sometimes seemed unpredictable and driven by unclear motive. They did not seem to be consistent in how they related to one another. And in Leah's case, she brought a confusing array of friends and acquaintances who were hard to tell apart and even harder to understand.

The pacing was slow. Especially towards Christmas in the first season, events seemed to drag out interminably. And then, having set the scene, things didn't really start to go anywhere until well into the second season. The ending came suddenly and didn't quite feel like an ending - if the reader could even fathom what was happening (and I'm not sure this reader quite managed it). The writing was quite downbeat which fitted well with the dreariness of the footballers' lives, but tended to add to the feeling that this was going on for a bit too long.

Oh, and as for "Town"... I never did quite believe in it. Clearly designed to be a neutral generic - on the south coast, playing in green and red (a colour combination unknown in England), recently promoted from the Conference. But nobody refers to a football club as Town. United, perhaps. City or Villa. But not Town. And did we really believe that someone who had only ever appeared a couple of times as a substitute for the local League 2 outfit would be recognised wherever he went?

A Natural is quite good - very good in parts - but it just doesn't quite deliver on the high promise of the opening pages.

For such potentially interesting and though-provoking subjects – masculinity and sexuality within football – this book remains dull from first to last. And not only dull – it’s also bland, the style flat and leaden, the characters and dialogue equally so. It’s all of the “he says this then he does that then he does something else” variety with no nuance or shading or attempt to get into the characters’ inner lives. Many issues are touched on in the novel and that’s certainly to its credit. Identity, being gay in a homophobic environment, shame, love and desire, depression and isolation. Weighty themes indeed, but all dealt with in the same monotonous tone. The book follows the career of a young and rather naïve teenager called Tom who has been let go by the Premier League Academy which had scouted him and is now playing for a minor league club – irritatingly and jarringly just called “Town”. He faces many challenges, not least his own disappointment, and increasingly his sexuality. The fact that the setting is football shouldn’t put anyone off as the drama and action is all played out off the pitch but what dull action it is – except when it’s being melodramatic and then it’s just silly. The “then this then that then this again” narrative style might well reflect the life the characters live but it doesn’t make for an entertaining read or allow the reader to really engage with the characters.

Football has not been well served by fiction and I still believe that Brian Glanville's "The Rise of Gerry Logan" is easily the best of not a great choice, if truth be told. Now we have a new and real contender for the title on "A Natural" which is beautifully written and concocted by a wonderful young writer in award winner Ross raisin.

He was done the hard yards and the story of a young pro who is so near but so far form making it reeks of authenticity as bears testament to the hours, days and week of research that the author conducted in and around the football milieu.

What does through loud and clear is the sheer slog of a footballers's life and how bleak, unwelcoming and negative the entire environment is and fear is the great motivator - fear of getting , dropped, fear of injury, fear of being released and fear of being ostracised by your teammates.

This is a welcome and thought provoking book that dares to tackle the taboo subject of homosexuality within football and is all the better for it.

A brave and daring effort and one that more than fulfils the reader's efforts

From the beginning I was completely mesmerized by Tom's story. Wonderfully written and very evocative, A Natural is a believable portrait of small-town football and a heartbreaking account of repression, shame and prejudice. I'm tempted to put money on this as a nominee for this years Booker Prize!