Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket

The summer of 1993 was a pivotal moment in English cricket: a team of aging stalwarts and hapless debutantes had just limply surrendered the Ashes again, but a promising young captain won his second match while in charge of a team full of new names. England fans heralded the dawn of a new era. Instead, it turned out to be the start of England's arguably worst streak in any sport--a decade of frustration, dismay, and comically bungling performances that no fan will ever forget. The English cricket team became infamous for their ineptitude and a byword for British failure. By 1999, the team had reached its nadir, losing at home to New Zealand to become, officially, the worst test team in the world, ranking below even Zimbabwe. With spectacularly poor timing, fourteen-year-old Emma John chose 1993 to fall in love with cricket and, mystifyingly, with that terrible English cricket team. One day, with nothing better to do, she asked her sports-fanatic mother to explain the rules of the game on TV. Within a fortnight, Emma was a full-fledged cricket geek. Nearly a quarter of a century later, she goes back to England to meet her teenage heroes and find out just what was going on in the Worst English Cricket Team of All Time. As she traipses back through her adolescence, Following On is also a personal memoir of what it was like to grow up following a team that always lost--and why on earth anyone would choose to do it.

Humor & Entertainment

John, Emma

Humor

Wisden

Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South

Can you feel nostalgic for a life you've never known? Suffused with her much-loved warmth and wit, Emma John's memoir follows her moving and memorable journey to master one of the hardest musical styles on earth - and to find her place in an alien world. Emma had fallen out of love with her violin when a chance trip to the American South introduced her to bluegrass music. Classically trained, highly strung and wedded to London life, Emma was about as country as a gin martini. So why did it feel like a homecoming? Answering that question takes Emma deep into the Appalachian mountains, where she uncovers a hidden culture that confounds every expectation - and learns some emotional truths of her own.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Can you feel nostalgic for a life you've never known? Suffused with her much-loved warmth and wit, Emma John's memoir follows her moving and memorable journey to master one of the hardest musical styles on earth - and to find her place in an alien world. Emma had fallen out of love with her violin when a chance trip to the American South introduced her to bluegrass music. Classically trained, highly strung and wedded to London life, Emma was about as country as a gin martini. So why did it feel like a homecoming? Answering that question takes Emma deep into the Appalachian mountains, where she uncovers a hidden culture that confounds every expectation - and learns some emotional truths of her own.

Everything I Know About Love for the over 40s\nThere is a piece of cod-wisdom regularly dispensed to single women: romance will arrive when you least expect it. I had assumed it would also make its own travel arrangements too.\nEmma John is in her 40s; she is neither married, nor partnered, with child or planning to be.\nIn her hilarious and unflinching memoir, Self-Contained, she asks why the world only views a woman as complete when she is no longer a single figure and addresses what it means to be alone when everyone else isn't.\nIn her book, she captures what it is to be single in your forties, from sharing a twin room with someone you've never met on a group holiday (because the couples have all the doubles with ensuite) to coming to the realisation that maybe your singleness isn't a temporary arrangement, that maybe you aren't pre-married at all, and in fact you are self-contained.\nThe book is an exploration of being lifelong single and what happens if you don't meet the right person, don't settle down with the wrong person and realise the biggest commitment is to yourself.

Self-Contained: Scenes from a single life

Parenting & Relationships

Cassell

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by John, Emma. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by John, Emma

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by John, Emma. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket

Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South

Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South

Self-Contained: Scenes from a single life