Kendrick Briscoe is an unashamedly Northern writer whose stories are shaped by the people, places and experiences that have defined his life. Born and raised in Leeds and now living on the East Yorkshire coast, he writes with warmth, humour and authenticity, drawing inspiration from the everyday moments that leave a lasting mark. His new novel, Love Postponed, is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Leeds United's unforgettable 1991-1992 title-winning season. Blending first love, friendship, heartbreak and football, it captures a year when everything seemed possible. Kendrick was good enough to tell us more about the book, the inspiration behind it, and why some years stay with us forever.
Love Postponed grew out of memories I'd been carrying for thirty years without quite realising it: my first car, my first job, my first proper heartbreak, all tangled up with the season that Leeds United won the league. I honestly thought that's how life would be forever. Leeds winning trophies, reaching different and varied milestones in life with the ease of finding motorway service stations. It turns out life wouldn't quite be that simple!
I wanted to write about growing up in that specific period because I don't think many people get handed a coming-of-age story with both a soundtrack and a trophy attached. My friends and I had grown up on nothing but Second Division football, we were the kids wearing Leeds shirts where most of the others were in Spurs, Liverpool and other red shirts. Leeds were in the bottom half of the Second Division when Howard Wilkinson arrived. He proceeded to, seemingly overnight, drag us out of the shadow of the Revie era and started writing a new chapter entirely. One minute we were nobodies, a team that used to be good; the next we were lifting the First Division championship trophy. It genuinely felt that fast.
But it was never just about the football. It was the whole world around it: The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, the Charlatans, an indie explosion soundtracking everything from getting ready on a Saturday to the walk to the ground. Music and football were intertwined that year. Manchester gave me the music and we took their glory. How utterly splendid.
Love Postponed uses the 1991–1992 title-winning season as the framework, with each chapter built around a fixture, the result closing it out. But the real story running underneath is an eighteen-year-old lad working out who he is: his first car, his first job, the girl, the heartbreak, his best mate and all the small disasters of being eighteen, clumsy and somewhere between a boy and a man.
Think of it as Fever Pitch meets The Inbetweeners, with a dash of Notting Hill. It has the love of a football club growing into mild obsession, the schoolboy humour and daftness of The Inbetweeners, and just enough warmth to remind you it's a love story too. It's semi-autobiographical, which is a polite way of saying a lot of it really happened, filtered through fiction and a fair bit of hindsight. Writing it meant going back through a year I hadn't properly revisited in decades, and finding it was still all there: the details, the daftness, the ache of it all.
If you were there, not literally at Elland Road, but knocking about that season, listening to indie music and navigating life at a similar age, I hope Love Postponed brings some of it flooding back, with a few laughs along the way. And if you weren't, I hope it gives you a sense of what it felt like to be young in a city falling in love with its own football team once again.
Love Postponed: A Story of Love, Life and Leeds United, by Kendrick Briscoe, is available now on Amazon.
