Overachieving and eccentric football manager Brian Clough was on his way to take over at the country's most successful, and most reviled football club: Leeds United, home to a generation of fiercely competitive but ageing players. The battle he'd face there would make or break the club - or him. David Peace's extraordinarily inventive novel tells the story of a world characterised by fear of failure and hunger for success set in the bleak heart of the 1970s.

David Peace was born and brought up in Yorkshire. He attended Manchester Polytechnic from 1988-91 and got a BA in English. He taught English in Istanbul from 1992-1993 and then moved to Tokyo - where he has lived ever since. His work to date has concerned itself the Yorkshire of the 70s and 80s - the place and time in which he grew up. During the course of writing GB84, he found out that his great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather and his brothers were all miners. He also found out that many of them were killed in the Thornhill Mining disaster of 1983 - when 139 men were killed. He is the author of the Red Riding Quartet as well as GB84 and was included on Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003.