The Boy on the Shed

A fascinating life story, bearing much heart and soul as well as being ‘warts and all’. It is well worth reading for its honesty and its insights by any reader and will be a particularly absorbing read for anyone with an interest or love for ‘the beautiful game’ as well as Ulster readers and those who remember the would-be local football star from these shores. - Irish Tatler

What a life, what a book…it is excellent. Sports book of the year. - BBC Radio 2 Simon Mayo

A remarkable piece of writing…Life, death, love, leaving home, motherly relationships, striving, all weaved into the football journey and every page I found myself relating to his experiences, some very personal…So much more than a sporting memoir. You could take so much from it without an interest in football. - Simon Bird, Football Correspondent, Daily Mirror

Paul Ferris has written a book that transcends genres…Ferris writes with the sort of fluency that, on the pitch, once impressed peers such as Paul Gascoigne.Ferris has gone beyond standard sports autobiographies. The Boy On The Shed is of a time and place, of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, of growing up a Catholic on a Protestant estate in Lisburn in the 1970s. It is a story of everyday sectarianism and its effects…These books offer a window on another world. Paul Ferris spent much of his childhood in Lisburn looking through one. What he saw, how he understood it and didn’t understand it, is gripping. - Irish Times

Superb - Oliver Holt

An excellent read. - Alan Shearer

Paul Ferris’s compelling memoir is different. For starters, he wrote it all himself, beautifully. Also, it extends well beyond football…It has been quite a journey from the garden shed he used to climb, back in Lisburn, that gives this engaging book its title - and one which thoroughly confounds the notion of the idiot footballer. - Daily Mail

This will be one of the most talked about football books of 2018. - Henry Winter