Floodlit Dreams Ltd

'Tony Adams calls it a “celebration of recovery.” It’s a monument to candour too. Gruesome memories come with smiles… The fresh detail in his new autobiography, 1996, adds layers that are both harrowing and redemptive as he goes about the work of helping others.' PAUL HAYWARD, The ObserverIt was the summer of Euro 96 and England was in party mood as the nation hosted a major tournament, revelling in watching Gazza and Co reach the semi-finals. For the national team's captain Tony Adams, though, it masked a misery that had been building all year, with his wife leaving and his children being removed from him as a result of his dangerous and damaging drinking. Following Gareth Southgate's crushing penalty miss against Germany, Adams proceeded to embark on a 44-day bender to drown sorrows that learned how to swim and led him into some seamy, sordid situations. Finally, he could take no more and desperation drove him to quit the booze and get help. A year that had begun in dark despair would end in a new lightness of being. In 1996, Adams revisits in candid, graphic detail that year when football came home but England's thirty years of hurt continued. And, as he reaches his 60th birthday, he reflects with trademark honesty and accumulated wisdom on his own remarkable thirty years off hurt.

"Really beautiful... If you're an Everton fan, you must buy this book. If you're a football fan of a certain age, I would really recommend it as well. A really funny, smart writer talking about football, his family and what it means. You will laugh and cry." Richard Osman, The Rest Is Entertainment podcastJIMMY MULVILLE is one of the most significant figures in British television as owner and managing director of Hat Trick Productions, creators of such hit shows as Drop The Dead Donkey, Outnumbered and Have I Got News For You.He is also a lifelong devotee of Everton FC, having grown up less than a mile from Goodison Park, and has loved them then left before returning to them over the course of their modern history of 80s success followed by regular Premier League struggles. In There's Gonna Be A Show, the Liverpool comprehensive kid who read Classics at Cambridge University tells how Everton have been the backdrop to his father's suicide and his own drug addiction; how he reconnected with his home city after getting clean and sober and helped Bill Kenwright buy the club. Taking as starting point the last game at Goodison Park, sponsored by Hat Trick, and ending with the first game at the new Hill Dickinson Stadum, this is a beautifully written memoir of football's emotional potency and poignancy.