Perhaps the problem, is that it's a sport book that wants to be a lot more. But it felt like the wrong bits were edited Paul Ferris has written a book that transcends genres...Ferris writes with the sort of fluency that, on the pitch, once impressed peers such as Paul Gascoigne.Ferris has gone beyond standard sports autobiographies. The Boy On The Shed is of a time and place, of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, of growing up a Catholic on a Protestant estate in Lisburn in the 1970s. It is a story of everyday sectarianism and its effects...These books offer a window on another world. Paul Ferris spent much of his childhood in Lisburn looking through one. What he saw, how he understood it and didn't understand it, is gripping. ( Irish Times) Enough depth and humanity to make your average football autobiography look like a Ladybird book.’ Telegraph I’m laughing but those two things, they just shake your confidence in everything. Where you didn’t have fear before, you have it. If I get a chest pain now I think ‘oh, what’s that?’ I have three boys and up to that point they think their dad’s invincible.

As a youngster living in Lisburn, he saw his home petrol-bombed by loyalists and his mum and dad beaten up in the street and lived constantly with the fear that his mother’s heart condition would kill her. My brother Patsy died in his late 50s. Joseph had a bypass many years ago. Elizabeth, my sister who doesn’t smoke or drink, has had two stents put in, my brother Eamonn has had two stents I think put in, my sister Denise has had a stent, my brother Tony in New Zealand – who was an ex-professional footballer – has had stents.Today was his first climb to the top. He knew if he was there, watching, then she would never leave him. Her name was Bernadette and he climbed the shed every day.~

A roller coaster read with appeal beyond football fans, this is a tale of struggle and tragedy, of love and hope, and offers humbling reality as an alternative to the traditional rags to riches adventure. * Daily Express *Newcastle United boarding a plane bound for Bermuda in 1985. Paul Gascoigne is to the left of Paul Ferris on the steps I came out with nothing at all. I remember calling at a friend’s house and his mum answered the door and when she asked what I was doing there, I told her I needed somewhere to stay. That I didn’t want to go home yet because I think I can still get fit. The Boy on the Shed has enough depth and humanity to make your average football autobiography look like a Ladybird book. * The Telegraph *

Ferris was far from a typical footballer (those usually being lads who never had the academic ability to excel at anything beyond the sports arena); as his disillusionment with the game he loved to play grew, so blossomed a calling to a different career: the law. He tells us all about that journey, too. All the time he was going through the treatment he was dealing with his publishing deal for his first book The Boy On The Shed. He tells about the publicity tour for the book and his excitement and sadness for the ones that won’t get to see him being a published author. I was in hospital the February after getting my prostate out when I got the offer from [publishing company] Hodder. When I was getting treatment then, I wanted to wait until it was all over before the book came out.”

Reviews

Paul Ferris has a good story to tell, in fact several, Irish and Geordie, politics and football, and he tells it well, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of trying to be either lyrical or philosophical or too clever. ( Hunter Davies) This is a brave yet humorous book which will serve a valuable purpose by highlighting that this disease can be beaten and hopefully encouraging that every man goes and gets a PSA test regularly a prevention is far better than cure.