Derby Day

By: Sebastian Holt

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Mateo Silva reads space for a living — the gaps between defenders, the angle before the pass. Liam Gallagher is the first player he can't place.

Mateo is twenty-four, Brazilian, and the most naturally gifted attacking midfielder Castleford City have signed in a decade. Liam is thirty, English, and has spent twelve years building a system so complete it has become invisible. No girlfriend, no stories, no answers to questions nobody asks because Liam's silence has made the questions unnecessary. On the pitch, he reads the game before it happens. Off it, he has built a life defined by what isn't there.

Then Liam transfers to Northgate City — Castleford's crosstown rivals — and the private and the professional collapse into each other.

Derby Day is a novel about proximity and silence, about the rules you build your career on and what happens when they stop working. About two men discovering that the most important distance in the world is the distance between who you've been performing for twelve years and who you actually are.