'A wonderful book - I was helplessly absorbed' - Bill Bryson

In his memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Gunner, former football journalist Patrick Mangan relives the agony and the ecstasy of growing up in rural Australia in the 1970s as an Arsenal-FC-supporting English immigrant cast helplessly adrift from the mother country.

Like Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch set among the gum trees and the dust, this is the tale of a scrawny Pommy kid falling desperately in love with the world game and the Gunners, as well as his unrelenting - occasionally unfathomable - crusade to convert the pagans of the Aussie outback to his noble cause.

'Utterly beguiling' - Geraldine Doogue, Radio National, Australia

'Exuberant and self-deprecating' - The Age

'Dead-set fantastic - I think it's the fastest I've ever read a book' - Santo Cilauro, co-host of Santo, Sam and Ed's Total Football

Originally published as Offsider by Melbourne University Press