The Boy on the Shed:A remarkable sporting memoir with a foreword by Alan Shearer: Sports Book Awards Autobiography of the Year

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Paul Ferris (born 10 July 1965) is a Northern Irish former footballer, physiotherapist for Newcastle United, barrister and author.

While this is an important subject, and therefore should be an important book, it is only one person's experience and rather histrionic storytelling.

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)

I loved "The Boy In The Shed" which was poignant and beautifully written and this is a worthy successor although a totally different type of book. Football memoirs rarely produce great literature but Ferris’s The Boy on the Shed is a glistening exception.’ Guardian THE days after the death of his football career were some of the most difficult. Bernadette’s passing in 1987 couldn’t have come at a worse time as Ferris struggled to make sense of an opportunity given and then gone in the blink of an eye. My granddaughter [Isla] was born last February; I watch her and think, in 10 or 15 years you’ll open it and see your name in the front of the book and it’ll be a precious thing. Today, thanks to a chance meeting with multi-millionaire businessman Graham Wylie, Paul is the managing director of a health and fitness company that recently opened five new outlets and plans to open several more in the coming months.It’s not all sadness, there are some funny parts. I loved the writing style and the brutal honesty of exactly what he went through physically and emotionally. 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. Talented and carefree on the pitch, shy and anxious off it, he earns a tilt at stardom. His first spell at Newcastle turns sour, as does his return as a physio, although obtaining a Masters degree shows him what he could achieve away from football. Former Newcastle United winger Paul Ferris was 51. He had successfully forged a post-football career as a physio, barrister and then a CEO, and his award-winning memoir, The Boy on the Shed, was just about to be published. But then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. This honest, sometimes brutal and frequently funny book tells the story of what happened next. Tonight he is on UTV Life withPamela Ballantine. Today and tomorrow at Eason and Waterstones in Belfast and Lisburn on a flying return visit to the land of his birth. There are various radio commitments too.

But this is no misery memoir. There are dark days, but also times when life soared to heights he could never imagine. It is also not a run-of-the-mill book about football, but a well-rounded, exceedingly candid account of his life on and off the pitch and of his family, warts and all. What makes the book even harder to read in parts are the long tracts of reported speech - ....and my mother said to me just before she passed away "Son.......". Obviously, there is some artistic licence allowed in these circumstances, but it happens every time there's a critical point in the narrative. People just don't speak like this - and if they do, the person hearing it is hardly going to transcribe it as it's being said. It destroys the credibility of the passage - and moreover, it raises doubts about other parts of the book based on recalled memory.His electrifying pace, a drop of the shoulder that bamboozled many a defender and the coolness of a killer in front of goal, Ferris was one of - if not the- first to be landed with the ‘new George Best’ tag. Despite the heavy loading, and a natural reticence to “push myself forward”, this is a moment he has looked forward to. Yet this autobiography is more than a tale of the vagaries of sporting fortune. It begins during 'The Troubles' in a working-class Catholic family in the Protestant town of Lisburn, near Belfast. After a childhood scarred by his mother's illness and sectarian hatred, Paul meets the love of his life, his future wife Geraldine. The local UDA commander came to their home to say his men were not involved and pledged to find out who was, before Bernadette literally pushed him out the front door with her uninjured arm. But when he was handed the task of saving the skin of his home town club midway through the 2008/2009 season, Ferris was the first person he called.