Why a Booktrail?
Hillsborough 1989 – The worst sporting disaster in British history.
FAN
What you need to know before your trail
‘You’ll never walk alone’ became the message of support as well as the song that will forever be associated with that dark day. The utter tragedy of what happened will never be forgotten.
FAN is a novel that is based on this tragedy and the author Danny Rhodes will know perhaps better than most of how to put the raw emotion into words since he was one of the onlookers there that day. Not an easy book to write we would imagine but by the end you will be grateful that he had the strength and the foresight to put pen to paper, however tear stained the pages will be at that point.
Travel Guide
Teenager John Finch is a fan of Nottingham Forest who travels all over to attend football matches. FAN tells his story of his devotion to his team and contains snippets of football notices and events from 1985 onwards leading up to the fateful day and beyond as John tries to make sense of what he has lived through when so many did not.
Even if you are not interested in football as sport, this is so much more than just a football themed book. This is a story of the human spirit and someone trying to make not just sense of what happened that day – (for how could they?) but writing a tribute to all those who were affected by the tragedy and especially to those who lost their lives.
The clock ticked towards kick off.The camera shows a scene of chaos, shows a swaying fluctuating mass of people.
Such simple stark sentences place you in the rawest state of emotions. This will take you back to that day as you watched the disaster unfold on television. I almost want to close my eyes to avoid reading as if by doing so what happened could be prevented.
The book also mentions the disaster which occurred in 1985 – the disaster at the Heysel stadium disaster in Brussels when the Liverpool and Juventus fans clashed. I was in Brussels at the time and still have many friends there who had either been at the match or had witnessed it so this was a nice way of acknowledging the pain that resulted from this day too.
Streetview Maps
A) Hillsborough stadium
A) Hillsborough stadium
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: FAN
Destination: Sheffield Departure Time: 1989
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