Springwood Stars — Barry Hines

The previously unpublished last novel by Barry Hines, Springwood Stars tells the story of a village soccer team during the hardships of a 1920s miners’ strike. They struggle, for the sake of their village's spirit, to keep the squad together. In the guise of a historical novel, Springwood Stars is a powerful and nuanced reflection on strike action and how it plays out in a working-class community. Meanwhile the long shadow of the Great War looms over all, aristocrat and worker alike. Due to the changing character of Hines' erstwhile publisher Michael Joseph (a Penguin imprint which by 2002 was focusing on its new commercial mission of publishing “women’s fiction, crime, thrillers, cookery, memoirs and lifestyle books”), Hines would have needed to find a new publisher for this novel, but after writing it, he became ill and never did. Now for the first time Hines' late novel is available. A historical novel from a working class perspective, it is informed and enriched by Hines' own experience of growing up in a mining community and of the seismic 1984-5 Miners’ Strike.