The Kilburn Social Club

Synopsis

The Kilburn Social Club is a Premiership football team of opera singers, academics and South African freedom fighters. It's a dream, a club where no one is more equal than anyone else, managed by an enigmatic war hero, inspired by a gay Argentinian millionaire and led by the restless, World Cup-winning Great Britain captain, and backed by the Rosslare Group, a Liberal-utopian business empire. A medical student inherits KSC and the Rosslare Group. Can she protect them from the hungry world, from rapacious tycoons, snakes in the grass and the blunderbuss venality of money? Why should she have to, and does she even want to? And how will she cope with her football-crazy sister's jealousy? From doomed lust to innocence defiled, from hopeless loss to dulled acceptance to hope reborn, this is an old-fashioned heroes and villains state-of-the-nation romance set in a wish-fulfilment alternative London. The Kilburn Social Club is a story of love, idealism and identity in something like modern, multicultural Britain. It doesn't demand any football pre-knowledge - it's for sceptics and sports lovers alike, neither cynical about what makes fans tick nor devoted to parroting the press-release puff of football's absurd self-image. And beyond this, there are the eternal stories of finding the people we share our lives with, how we choose, what we settle for and why. It is also about the cosmology of footballs.