Believe in the Sign is about a damp corner of England where nothing much but everything happens. It is a ‘sort-of’ memoir of a normal, average boy who would have grown up happily average and normal but for a dark and perverse passion: the seductive lure of masochistic devotion to a no-hope, near-derelict football club.
But it isn’t all joyously uplifting.

Swimming through the murk is a swarm of snapshots that bring growing up in the 1970s and 1980s into startling focus. Mad kids and sad kids and good kids from broken homes; teenage wrecking parties; pub brawls; long existential marches along the motorway banking; the baiting of Elton John and a club chairman caught playing ‘away from home’.

Then Death bumps into Life. A girl is abducted and the town becomes a cave, the light sucked out. Meanwhile in the sunny shine outside, the future is afoot. Cotton mills close down and supermarkets invade; school leavers evolve into YOP-fodder and everyone’s mum is holding Tupperware parties to get the down-payment on a colour telly.
Variously serious and funny, steely-eyed and tender, Hodkinson plumbs the depths but is not afraid of the shallows. Dip a toe.

Four Four Two
When Saturday Comes
Big Issue in the North
The Telegraph
The Guardian, Christmas books
The Guardian
The Independent on Sunday
The Observer
The Times, Christmas books
The Times
The Skinny
Left Lion, interview

Letter from Alan Sillitoe about Believe in the Sign

Feature in The Guardian on murder of Lesley Molseed (as featured in book):
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/nov/18/ukcrime.focus

To buy book: Pomona, store