The Undisputed King of Selston

Name: The Undisputed King of Selston
Price: 24.99 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9781399816809

‘Captivating and deeply moving’ Richard Coles

Danny Scott

$24.99

Paperback

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English

John Murray Publishers Ltd
12 March 2026

Memoirs; Mining industry; Mining technology & engineering

'Captivating and deeply moving.' Richard Coles

'Evocative, beautifully written . . . conjures locations and feelings almost magically.' Jeremy Vine

'My brain has made the decision . . . I am going to love this book.' Richard Hawley

There was a time when he felt like the undisputed King of Selston.

Then again, there were several years when he was convinced that he could talk to animals and had even mastered the power of flight - sailing nightly over the headstocks, slag heaps and doggedly beautiful countryside of an isolated East Midlands mining village.

But, deep down, Danny Scott knew that the real King of Selston was and always would be coal. Over the last seven hundred years, coal dust had settled on every inch of Selston. It was in the food he ate, the air he breathed and the words he spoke. It fashioned resilient men like his dad and The Texan; feisty women like his mother, whose right-hook was feared even more than her fondness for house fires.

Danny was a clever bugger - dangerously clever, some said - and fiercely proud of Selston, his dad and his mining heritage. Five generations of his family had spent their working lives underground, providing fuel for the Industrial Revolution, the electrical, rail and motoring revolutions. Without it, the modern age wouldn't have been so . . . modern.

But as this young boy prepared to follow in his dad's footsteps, things began to change. The Devil became captain of the local darts team. Fortune tellers held seances in the front room of his council house. And that once unassailable King's reign seemed to be coming to an end.

For dangerously clever buggers, there was only one option... somewhere else, someone new.

Funny, poignant and alive to the unheralded beauty, purpose and camaraderie of a village which finds itself on the wrong side of history, THE UNDISPUTED KING OF SELSTON shines a light onto a forgotten industry and the dark shadows that wormed their way into the families who got left behind.

'Proper working class stories don't get much of a look-in these days. A shame, really. Especially when they're as beautifully written as this one.' Noddy Holder

By: Danny Scott
Imprint: John Murray Publishers Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 196mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 174g
ISBN: 9781399816809
ISBN 10: 1399816802
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 12 March 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Danny Scott grew up in an East Midlands mining village, serving his apprenticeship as an engineer on leaving school, before moving to London in the 1980s. After a job in counter (industrial) espionage, he became a private investigator, then a painter and decorator, then an engineer again, before becoming a journalist and interviewing people like Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, Usain Bolt and Dave Hill from Slade. He lives in Essex with his wife and their young son.

Reviews for The Undisputed King of Selston: ‘Captivating and deeply moving’ Richard Coles

Evocative, beautifully written . . . conjures locations and feelings almost magically. * Jeremy Vine * My brain has made the decision... I am going to love this book. * Richard Hawley * As an East Midlander myself, although from a leafier part than the mining village of Selston, I found Danny Scott's account of his unarguable claim to dominion of our homeland shading into something humbler and truer was both captivating and deeply moving. * Richard Coles * A tender, tough and surprisingly lyrical memoir of a working class boyhood in a disappeared world. Imagine D. H. Lawrence growing up in the era of Ronco and K-Tel. Rich and evocative. -- Stuart Maconie If you're a fan of working class memoirs, you will love this book. Set in the 1970s, it's full of humour, pathos and charm . . . I came to love his village, his family and all the other eccentrics who lived there. Danny Scott really is a very clever bugger. * Michelle Collins *