Racial tensions and the plight of immigrant life in 1970 s England create the backdrop for the story of a soccer player s act of violence that will haunt his son for years to come. At nineteen, Geoffhurst is getting along just fine. He has his own flat away from his family, eight jars to divide his weekly pay, and a standing order at Madame Wong s Chinese Restaurant. But when a reporter offers to pay him handsomely to tell his story, Geoffhurst must return to the past, and to the unspeakable events that transformed his life eight years ago. In the long, hot, asphalt-melting summer of 1976, Geoffhurst s life was happily full of superheroes. There was his six-foot mother, the most glamorous woman in the neighborhood; his aunt, a witch; his gang the Four Aces; and of course, his father, Sonny, one of the first black professional soccer players in England. Frustrated by the racial taunts he s endured on-field and off, Sonny snapped, bringing Geoffhurst s childhood to a close on the very same day that the heat wave broke in a massive thunderstorm. Rendered with blazing lyricism, and shifting between Geoffhurst s Technicolor nostalgia and his aunt s Caribbean-inflected English, Lazy Eye is a brilliant account of the last moments before a man loses control.

About Donna Daley-Clarke

Donna Daley-Clarke was born in London to Montserratian parents. Her debut novel, Lazy Eye, was published in the U.K. in July 2005 and won the Commonwealth Writer s First Novel Award in 2006. She received her MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her short fiction has been published in magazines and anthologies and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and she has been awarded numerous fellowships and literary prizes. She lives in London.