Answered Prayers

Author Duncan Hamilton
Narrator Jonathan Firth
Publisher Quercus
Run Time 14 hours and 30 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Association football (Soccer), Autobiography: sport, Biography and non-fiction prose, History of sport, Sports and Active outdoor recreation.

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

Terrific. As good on post-war Britain as Peter Hennessy. Informed and heart-breaking.

Stephen Frears

An expert observer of different forms of Englishness, he treats sportspeople as three-dimensional humans.

Financial Times

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.

Guardian (Book of the Week)

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.

Sunday Times (Book of the Week)

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.

Peter Hennessy

This may well be one of the best books ever written about football.

Choice Magazine

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.

Daily Express

Hamilton has a gift for treating sportspeople as humans

Financial Times (Book of the Year)

A highly poignant, history of England’s World Cup victory in 1966.

Daily Express (Book of the Year)

The finest sports book of the year by one of the country’s most garlanded sports writers.

Daily Mail

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.

Sports Journalists' Association

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