The Black Diamond

The Black Diamond pulses with the raw energy of early twentieth-century working-class England. Abner Fellows, a miner's son in the coal-blackened village of Halesby, finds himself trapped between two worlds: the pit's darkness below and the football pitch above, where his skill offers a glimpse of escape. His father John is proud, brutal, and complicated, a man who loves his son fiercely but expresses it through hard hands and harder words. When John is hospitalized, Abner becomes the breadwinner for the household, forced to provide for his rough, hard-drinking father and his young stepmother Alice. The stakes turn deadly when Abner refuses to throw a cup match for his boss's profit. Wrongfully sacked, then falsely accused of impropriety with his stepmother, he is beaten from the only home he's known and sent tramping westward through the industrial heartland. What follows is a visceral journey through a world where poverty corrupts, integrity brings ruin, and a young man must fight simply to remain himself. This is D.H. Lawrence country, but with football, and it burns with the same fierce, tragic intensity.