Best and Edwards

'The hero is the creature other people would like to be. Edwards was such a man, and he enabled people to respect themselves more.'

By the mid-fifties Manchester United had caught the imagination of the country. Duncan Edwards played his first game for the club at the age of fifteen years and eight months in 1953. Two years later he won his first England cap and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, referred to him as 'the spirit of British football'. On £15-a-week and living at Mrs Watson's boarding house at 5 Birch Avenue in Manchester, Edwards was the most prized of the Busby Babes. Then in February 1958 came Munich.

Half a decade later George Best represented United reborn. 'Georgie' of the boutiques and dolly birds; 'El Beatle' of the European Cup in '68 and European Player of the Year; in the opinion of Pele, the most naturally talented footballer that ever lived. Retired at 27 and reduced to the role of Chelsea barfly and tabloid perennial; George, where did it all go wrong?

An investigation into a club, two personalities and an England that has all but disappeared, Best & Edwards plots the course and trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways.

Auteur

Gordon Burn was the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He was also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards. His last book, Sex & Violence, Death and Silence, was a collection of his essays on art.