Following On

Truly original, clever, funny, poignant and passionate. * Clare Balding *Wittily and charmingly combines adolescent excess with grown-up irony and perspective. Sport hasn’t seen anything quite like this. * Simon Barnes *Emma’s memoir somehow manages to be the story of my own youth. It is a touching and funny account of a cricketing era that though recent also feels very long gone. * Miles Jupp *A winner – funny, warm, perceptive, and wonderfully evocative. Highly recommended. * Michael Simkins *Deftly comic, wonderfully true, for anyone who has ever thought that England, chasing 600 in the fourth innings, just might do it. * Gideon Haigh *A beautifully constructed and painfully honest memoir of blind loyalty to an unworthy sporting team. * Lynne Truss *Wonderful, funny, elegantly turned and strikingly perceptive. Above all it has a warmth you don’t often find in cricket writing. * Marcus Berkmann *I have read a fair few cricket books but none like this.… Consistently witty and full of wonder. * Arthur Smith *A fresh and lively read * The Observer *A gloriously funny yet poignant memoir * The Guardian *It is in equal measure funny, insightful, perceptive, illuminating and best of all a jolly good cricket read * *A witty and thoughtful recollection of growing up as a sports-mad girl in the Nineties * School Sport *A funny and touching memoir * School Sport *Following On is the wonderful story of John’s rather unhealthy teenage obsession with England’s finest set of losers … It is a very funny depiction of why cricket touches you, however bad the team is that you follow * The Cricket Paper *A real treat of a book, that will gladden the hearts of any cricket lover over 25, and broaden the horizons of anyone under. * All Out Cricket *John met and interviewed 11 players of the Nineties for her book … She recounts their stories with wit, warmth and perceptiveness’ * New Statesman *A witty, wry memoir … the comparisons to Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch are justified * Independent i *

Emma John is a writer and editor on The Guardian and The Observer. She is a former deputy editor of Observer Sport Monthly and The Wisden Cricketer, and in 2008, she was the first woman to win a Sports Journalism Award. She lives in north London and has been on the MCC waiting list for 17 years, six months and 21 days. Not that she’s counting.