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Vote for your favourite sports book and win £50 in book tokens

Why not take the chance to win £50 in National Book Tokens by voting for your favourite sports book from among the winners at the British Sports Book Awards, announced earlier this month!  Follow the link to an online form to register your vote an be entered automatically into a draw.
To help you chose, The Sports Bookshelf is highlighting each of the eight contenders to be named the overall British Sports Book of the Year. Today's category winner:

BEST CRICKET BOOK 

Harry Pearson has been observing northern life with affectionate humour in various ways since announcing his credentials as a writer via The Far Corner, his ‘mazy dribble through north-east football’ in 1995.

In Slipless in Settle, which won him the MCC/Cricket Society Book of the Year award before the British Sports Book Awards judges gave it their vote as Best Cricket Book, he turns his attention to club cricket -- but not in a way that is awash with sentiment even if there is a sense of warm appreciation.

The club cricket in which Pearson immersed himself is serious stuff. It is a world populated with characters that lend themselves perfectly to his gift for humorous description but highly competitive, but the game is played by cricketers aware of the history of the former pit villages and mill towns they represent, clubs that have, down the years, produced some of England’s greatest players and spent fortunes on importing the biggest names in the international game to boost their battle for local supremacy.

Pearson's writes with an easy charm, painting an engaging portrait of a world that has been home at different times to Andrew Flintoff and Learie Constantine and a cast of thousands of more or less honourable others, sharing pies and mushy peas at the tea bar and two types of mild in the clubhouse.

Nobody has a better eye for northern sporting character than Pearson. There is the groundsman he encounters with "a face so creased and lined by exposure to the elements he made later-period WH Auden appear a candidate to become the new face of Revlon"... and there’s the bowler whose appeal was "a blood-curdling yell delivered from a bow-legged squat that gave the impression of a man with piles sitting down on the wrong end of an invisible shooting stick".
--- Jim White, The Daily Telegraph. Read more…

Winners in the other categories were
Best Autobiography, Beware of the Dog, by Brian Moore
Best Biography -- Trautmann's Journey, by Catrine Clay
Best Football Book -- Promised Land, by Anthony Clavane
Best Rugby Book -- The Grudge, by Tom English
Best New Writer -- Bounce, by Matthew Syed
Best Racing Book -- The Story of Your Life, by James Lambie
Best Illustrated Title -- '61 The Spurs Double, by Doug Cheeseman, Martin Cloake and Adam Powley

Vote HERE for your favourite book from the winners of each of the award categories at the British Sports Book Awards at and you'll be entered -- free of charge -- in a draw to win £50 of National Book Tokens. Closing date June 12th. Full terms and conditions on the voting form.


VOTE NOW

To browse more books on cricket, visit The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

Read about the other award winners.

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