num_pages: 256
description: Racial tensions and the plight of immigrant life in 1970 s England create the backdrop for the story of a soccer player s act of violence that will haunt his son for years to come. At nineteen, Geoffhurst is getting along just fine. He has his own flat away from his family, eight jars to divide his weekly pay, and a standing order at Madame Wong s Chinese Restaurant. But when a reporter offers to pay him handsomely to tell his story, Geoffhurst must return to the past, and to the unspeakable events that transformed his life eight years ago. In the long, hot, asphalt-melting summer of 1976, Geoffhurst s life was happily full of superheroes. There was his six-foot mother, the most glamorous woman in the neighborhood; his aunt, a witch; his gang the Four Aces; and of course, his father, Sonny, one of the first black professional soccer players in England. Frustrated by the racial taunts he s endured on-field and off, Sonny snapped, bringing Geoffhurst s childhood to a close on the very same day that the heat wave broke in a massive thunderstorm. Rendered with blazing lyricism, and shifting between Geoffhurst s Technicolor nostalgia and his aunt s Caribbean-inflected English, Lazy Eye is a brilliant account of the last moments before a man loses control.
language: English
title: Lazy Eye
titlecomplete: Lazy Eye
ratings_count: 55
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Commonwealth Writers' Prize
category: Best First Book in South Asia and Europe
publisher: MacAdam/Cage